This site is meant to serve as a resource for learning about "behavior change". This broad term often refers to changing behaviors such as quitting smoking or getting people to exercise more and eat better. The principles can also be broadly relevant to any behavior – getting up in the morning, reducing procrastination, improving time management – any new habit a person might want to form but has a hard time doing so. As the site develops it will provide links past work on behavior change (research volumes and books that also provide general overviews, citations of specific research papers) and practical principles or how-to guides for changing behavior (by drawing on research to assess and improve the precision of typical commonsense advice, and spelling out the implications of basic research). I am a PhD student in cognitive science, and my goal is for it to be the kind of site I wish I'd been able to find when I first tried to connect my research to behavior change, or when I myself wanted to change a particular kind of behavior. (Feel free to email me with suggestions). A vast amount of research literature and practical projects are relevant to behavior change, so this certainly won't be exhaustive or answer all the important questions, and will miss many areas (please feel free to make suggestions). But rather than not tackle the task I prefer to make a limited effort and improve it over time and based on feedback. I see the effort as analogous to asking a philosophical or psychological question like "What is a concept?". The answers one develops are never "correct" or definitive but you come to understand the issues better. You gain and produce a lot of knowledge and are in a better position to make predictions and guide behavior in the real world. Moreover, not making such an effort makes it easy to do research and offer advice that is redundant with what has been done before, rather than extending and refining what is already known, and better understanding and using practical techniques for changing behavior. That makes it especially relevant to my own efforts to do research on behavior change. This is the link to a Reading Group at UC Berkeley for Spring 2012, meeting once a week for fifty minutes. This Knowledge Base is in the very early stages of ongoing development. If you have any questions, you can contact me at joseph_williams AT berkeley DOT edu. To just receive general updates on this website and other information you can sign up to: psychologyofbehaviorchange@googlegroups.com |
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