Hello everyone, continuing with my thesis of design for behaviour change and citizen culture I find myself with the following concern: how do ethics and morals relate to design for behaviour change?
In my current work, I'm trying to merge the knowledge of agrarian ethics with agricultural health and safety. One simple way of relating these two domains is through the socioecological model (SEM) form public health theory. That is, SEM argues that an individual (targeted for behavior change) is under the influence of different "layers" of society, i.e. perhaps their place as "citizen." These layers include family/friends, then work and local community, then institutions and policies, and up and up. In the end, if the moral or ethical relationship between the individual citizen and all these other influential elements of society can be described or quantified, the likelihood of using the moral/ethical content towards behavior change is improved. Example: in the 1990's, teaching shool-age children that smoking is "bad" and then they proceed home to nag their parents about the right/wrong of smoking. Because of the moral implications of "good parent" or "healthy children" smoking behavior changed over the years.
Great question! I hope you get many responses!
Thank you Dr. Bendixsen, I also hope to have more answers like yours. Could you expand the concept of "layers" of society? Thanks also for the example, it's interesting.
Greetings
Here are some literal definitiosn of layers according to public health professionals/theory:
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/overview/social-ecologicalmodel.html
https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/crccp/sem.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ecological_model
Not for shameless self promotion, but my articles regarding agrarian ethics and a special issue of the Journal of Agromedicine (Article Using the Socio-Ecological Model to Frame Agricultural Safet...
) could be helpful examples. In any case, the SEM model and its layers are a fairly tried and true way of talking about behavioral change, but the ethical relationships between the people and organizations that are included in the model have NOT been truly described, at least not in a mode of intervention research.
Are you asking about ethics for people DESIGNING a behavioral change program? Or are you asking about designing a program for ethical change? OR are you asking about experiences in implementation of programs that aim at ethical change (like the public health, smoking one mentioned above.) I am thinking a lot about this, and how to adjust pedagogy to push moral development. Behavioral economics has a lot to say about nudging people in an ethical direction.
Hi Eleanor, thank you for your answer. As my question goes, I look for the relationship between ethics and morality with the design for behavior change. That is, I am concerned about the broad issue of the concept. Another way to ask my question is: can design for behavior change fall into conductism?
Please excuse my poor english.
Regards
I'm not sure what you mean by conductism. Can you give me an example of the kind of thing you are worried about?
Thanks for your interest.
When designing for behavioural change there are two perspectives involved: the first, the designer modifies the behaviour at will or for personal interest; the second, the designer facilitates decision-making without personal interests (or at least not the designer's interests).
The first example shows an ethical violation (not only professional but also social)
Thank you for your time and references. Through BJ Fogg I got to Verbeek's work, very good indeed. I think DeepL will help a lot in the translation from Dutch to Spanish or English, I hope so. As I have also read you, I hope to be able to share my progress with you next year.
Happy holidays,
Juan
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