News

Project (01-July-2020)

A major grant from DFID through the Hygiene and Behaviour Change Consortium will allow a group of actors led by LSHTM to develop a branded campaign to fight COVID-19, working across several East African countries.

Publication (01-Jun-2020)

My paper outlining a way to define situations and contexts for behaviour, derived from Roger Barker's 'behaviour setting' concept, has been published in the Journal of General Psychology.

Project (01-Mar-2020)

Our contract with DFID to provide technical services to the Tanzanian national government has now been retargeted at campaigning to stop the spread of COVID.

Workshop (05-Feb-2020)

A major two-day workshop bringing together practitioners using Behaviour Centred Design from around the world was held in London, with the intent to identify ways to make the approach more user-friendly and powerful. A report is available.

Publication (10-Aug-2019)

A paper justifying the theoretical foundations of the 'human superorganism' approach to morality has been published in Frontiers in Sociology.

Event (01-Jun-2017)

The web-based home for Behaviour Centred Design (BCD) has been launched, where numerous resources, announcements and projects are made available. It is the central clearing house for all things BCD.

Project (01-Jan-2017)

DFID, the UK's Department for International Development, has granted our group at LSHTM a major contract to provide technical services to the Tanzanian government's National Sanitation campaign.

Publication (22-Aug-2016)

A paper modelling the causes of hand and household hygiene based on a large global dataset (12 countries!) has just been published in PLOS ONE.

Publication (21-Aug-2016)

An introduction to Behaviour Centred Design, the approach to behaviour change developed by myself with colleague Val Curtis, has just been published in Health Psychology Review.

Publication (25-Apr-2015)

Gaining Control: How Human Behaviour Evolved, written together with Val Curtis, has been published by Oxford University Press. It describes stages in the evolution of psychological mechanisms over the control of behaviour production in the human lineage.

Project (31-Oct-2012)

The Evo-Eco Approach to behaviour change has recently been used to develop a major field-based trial to promote handwashing with soap at crucial junctures during the day (such as after defecation) in rural Indian villages, with considerable success. The paper announcing the results from this trial have been submitt ed and await publication. Through work with colleagues at the Hygiene Centre at LSHTM, the approach is also being applied to other public health issues in other countries, such as infant nutritional supplementation in Indonesia, with a number of other possibilities in the pipe-line as well. Watch this space for results from these campaigns.

Application (09-Nov-2011)

Anyone can now take the web-based test of the 'human superorganism' approach to understanding the moral domain, hosted by the BBC's LabUK site. Help us do a bit of novel science in this exciting area. In return, you'll find out how your own moral tendencies differ from others around the world.

Application (22-Jul-2011)

Choose Soap is a generic handwashing promotion campaign designed by a group of us at the Hygiene Centre, together with Good Pilot, a creative agency in London. The campaign materials have now been uploaded to the web for use by anyone interested in increasing handwashing rates anywhere. Let us know if it works!

Course (21-Jul-2011)

The University of London distance learning course on the Control of Infectious Disease that I run has been updated with the help of an intrepid team from LSHTM. It now covers most of the classic topics in this area more judiciously. We hope students beginning next year will find the course more relevant and exciting than before.

Project (21-Jul-2011)

Together with colleagues from LSHTM, I designed and analysed a global survey for the Hygiene Council to investigate the causes of personal and household hygiene behaviours. The completed study of over 12,000 people in 12 countries (at least one on each continent) showed that habitual, routinized practice is the characteristic most strongly correlated with reported handwashing and surface cleaning behaviour. Tidiness and good manners were also strong predictors of these behaviours -- novel findings on which we hope to build in future with other studies.

Project (21-Jul-2011)

Recent studies have suggested that the risk of death among newborns can be reduced if their mothers and carers practice hand-washing with soap. My colleague Katie Greenland and I went to Indonesia on behalf of the USAID-Unilever partnership to investigate how women who had just become mothers could be convinced to take up better hygiene habits. It is thought that the life-changing event of giving birth (to a first child) is an opportune moment to introduce new healthy practices. Our intention was to provide insights for the design of a new intervention effort among birth attendants and carers of mothers with young children in Indonesia.

Project (21-Jul-2011)

Val Curtis and I conducted fieldwork in rural Bangladesh on behalf of UNICEF and DFID to help the SHEWA-B project (one of the largest hygiene promotion programmes ever attempted) to revitalize the hygiene promotion efforts of its vast cadre of hard-working and highly motivated Community Health Practitioners. We utilized video ethnography, behaviour trials and other novel techniques to isolate the causal factors most likely to be inhibiting up-take of the hand-washing message in this country.

Publication (21-Jul-2011)

Alison Krentel and I have published ‘Causal chain mapping: a novel method to analyse treatment compliance decisions, with application to lymphatic filariasis elimination in Alor, Indonesia’ in the journal Health Policy and Planning. See my publications page for a link.

Publication (21-Jul-2011)

Falko Sniehotta and I have published ‘Stage models of behaviour change’ in the textbook Health Psychology (2nd edition), edited by French, Kaptein, Vedhara and Weinman, from Wiley/Blackwell. Check out my publications page for a link.

Application (21-Jul-2011)

Val Curtis and I conducted a popular and successful workshop in mid-May at the 2011 WASH Conference on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in Brisbane. In it, we presented our novel approach to the psychology of behaviour change and intervention design processes to approximately 70 participants in a group work setting.

Publication (26-Feb-2010)

A study supervised by my student Gaby Judah (and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council) has recently been published in the American Journal of Public Health. It used novel technology to unobtrusively monitor real-world responses to different messages designed to incite people to wash their hands while in UK service station toilets. The objective was to screen theoretically-based interventions for their ability to produce real changes in behaviour; the results showed that some messages are indeed better than others at influencing this everyday behaviour, and that men and women respond to different kinds of messages.

Presentation (26-Feb-2010)

Presented my work on 'Perasmology' (the 'science of transitions') at the COST Systems Chemistry II: Evolution and Systems conference in Budapest.

Publication (13-Oct-2009)

'Types of technology' has just been published by Technological Forecasting and Social Change.