Stop telling people what to do: COM-B and behaviour change

It’s easy to assume that if people have the right information, they’re more likely to make better choices, and so much of the messaging we see relies on simply telling people what to do in the hopes that they will then just do it.

COM-B is central to The Behaviour Change Wheel, developed by Susan Michie, Lou Atkins, and Robert West. UCL’s Behaviour Change Interventions: Introductory Principles and Practice course explores how to identify target behaviours and use tools like COM-B to design effective behaviour change interventions.

The COM-B model offers a simpler way to understand why telling people what to do rarely achieves the behaviour change outcomes we want. It suggests that behaviour depend on three key components; capability, opportunity and motivation. If one of these aspects is missing, behaviour change is unlikely to happen.

So the three key questions we need to ask are:

1.     Can people actually do the behaviour? Capability is split into two key categories; physical capability and psychological capability. These are about assessing whether or not people have the right skills or ability to perform the behaviour as well as the knowledge and/or understanding.

2.     Does their environment support it? Opportunity to complete the behaviour is split into physical and social opportunity. This is about whether or not people have the right resources, such as time and access, or social influence from norms or societal pressures which might make behaviours easier or harder to carry out.

3.     Do they actually want to do it? Motivation covers both reflective motivation, so people’s beliefs about their own capability, intentions and goals, and automatic motivations, their emotional response, rewards and punishments.

Guidance like “wash your hands”, “Wear a mask” and “Please social distance” which we all saw an influx of during the COVID 19 pandemic, tends to assume that motivation is the missing factor. The reality is that behaviour change is more complicated than that and is likely due to a combination of these factors, which vary differ depending on the situation and context.

Telling people what to do overlooks the factors which are underpinning both current behaviours and the potential for behaviour change, the most effective interventions will consider all three aspects in their design.