'Hidden obstacles' to behavior change: A commentary by Alice Ng

Organizations of all kinds often aim to change people’s behavior by offering incentives or warning of negative consequences. Foundations, governments, and NGOs often rely on lessons learned from programmatic reports or interventions that worked in similar circumstances. But these approaches may fail to address factors that are preventing behavior change in a particular community or situation.

As a result, traditional grantmaking processes and nonprofit strategies sometimes fail to get the results we want because we don’t understand the motivations of the people we’re trying to engage well enough—that is, we don’t see the hidden obstacles. To accelerate progress on addressing big problems, we need to identify the barriers to behavior change before launching or funding a program and committing to a theory of change....

The challenges of bringing about behavior change get trickier with efforts to address systemic issues. Initially successful efforts may stall later on because they introduce new hidden obstacles. For example, research on using small-bore steps—“nudges”—to reduce carbon emissions found that while nudges may result in small improvements, they ultimately decrease support for higher-impact solutions like a carbon tax—by leading people to believe that there’s a quick and easy fix....

Read the full commentary by Alice Ng, senior advisor for fundraising at Multiplier.

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Hayri Er)