Nuancing “Knowledge” as a Target for Behavior Change Interventions: Implications for Effective Intervention Design

Stimulating and supporting behavior change is key for health promotion, social care, environmental conservation, and stigma reduction, among other areas. Many behavior change interventions primarily focus on increasing knowledge to improve health promoting behaviors. The underlying assumption is that unhealthy behavior (or failure to engage in health-promoting behaviors) results from ignorance or limitations in understanding the behavior or its consequences and that improving people’s knowledge (broadly defined) will lead to behavior change. In this paper, we argue that while knowledge (narrowly defined) about the recommended behavior is important and necessary, it is often not sufficient. Altering behavior requires addressing various other determinants, such as attitude, self-efficacy, perceived norms, and risk perception. Another consideration is that behavior change methods often used to target “knowledge” are actually methods designed to facilitate learning by enhancing the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information, ultimately supporting long-term memory retention. To target other key determinants of behavior beyond knowledge a wealth of more effective behavior change methods is available, provided they match the targeted determinants and are correctly applied.. Because knowledge-focused interventions rarely lead to actual behavior change, we recommend health promotion planners to go beyond improving knowledge and differentiate between knowledge and other determinants when choosing behavior change methods. To enhance intervention effectiveness, we emphasize the importance of intentionally targeting additional behavioral determinants that have stronger theoretical and empirical support as drivers of behavior change.