Thread by @matherion

@Heinonmatti What is 'it', here? Behavior Change (BC)? Well, I believe BC _can_ work - if you follow IM rigour, and then some.

But, the 'flavour' of exercising BC that has any chance of working is too complicated to ever be sellable.

What is sold (well), therefore, is the 'tricks' approach.

@Heinonmatti Nudging are an excellent example of this. The idea that you can have a list of BCTs that can be used to change behavior, is a more sophisticated version (you know where I stand in this respect; see e.g. 'as simple as possible').

@Heinonmatti Effectiveness and "sellability" are mutually exclusive, I think.

Combined with this: efforts at behavior change, in NL at least, are mostly developed by advertising agencies. They never evaluate; they look at e.g. 'impact' instead. So you're never 'exposed'.

@Heinonmatti So, there is no real 'trial' - in both senses of the word 😬

@Heinonmatti To get back to your dichotomisation: I believe 'it works' and so at least that bit of ethics is 'solved' - in a way. I don't believe that absolves us of another big responsibility.

@Heinonmatti As Rik and I iterated before (tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…), we have confidence in constant progress - or phrased reversely, we're nowhere near understanding most of psychology. So we have a strong responsibility to improve this, _while_ doing our best to solve societal problems.

@Heinonmatti Basically: the best hope we have is using protocols such as #InterventionMapping that guide us through working with stakeholders and target population individuals, targeting both environments and individuals, and leverage psychological evidence and theory to the fullest extent.

@Heinonmatti But, we know nothing (Jon Snow! 😬).
So while using this tiny bit of knowledge we have (which, still, is more than we had fifty years ago) to make the world a better place, we have to keep doing more fundamental research and improving our methods and knowledge translation etc.

@Heinonmatti I could summarize it as confidence in constant progress: or optimism through modesty 😬

We currently know much less than we'd want to - but we learn more every day.

So whatever we do today will suck a lot.

But what we do in five years will be slightly better.

And so on...