Researchers at UCL, NICE, Aberdeen, Dublin and IBM are building an ontology of human behavior change techniques (BCTs). A taxonomy has already been created, detailing 93 different hierarchically clustered techniques. This taxonomy is useful in itself; I could see myself using this to try to figure out which techniques work best for me, in fostering desirable habits and eliminating undesirable ones.
The ontology could be an extremely useful instrumental rationality tool, if it helps to identify which techniques work best on average, and in which combinations these BCTs are most effective.
It might also be a ontology that’s more distorting than helpful. The ontology looks like it tries to be agnostic about mental processes and as a result makes no assumptions about the moving parts that can be effected.
If you take a technique like CFAR’s internal double crux, it doesn’t fit well into that framework.
I’m nervous about mapping elements from the taxonomy onto existing techniques. You risk rationalising this way. But, for the sake of argument, one could say that internal double crux amounts to application of BCT 1.2 (problem-solving), BCT 4.3 (re-attribution), BCT 13.2 (framing/reframing), and BCT 13.3 (internal inconsistency). There are probably other ways of making it fit; therefore, I agree that the taxonomy, as it stands, isn’t very useful.
Now, one of the stated aims of the human behaviour change project is this:
The Knowledge System will continually search publication databases to find behaviour change intervention evaluation reports, extract and synthesise the findings, provide up-to-date answers to questions, and draw inferences about behaviour change. Practitioners, policy makers and researchers will be able to query the system to obtain answers to variants of the key question: ‘What intervention(s) work, compared with what, how well, with what exposure, with what behaviours, for how long, for whom, in what settings and why?’
If the ontology turns out as expected, I think it’ll be useful for designing and testing new behaviour change interventions.
I’m nervous about mapping elements from the taxonomy onto existing techniques. You risk rationalising this way.
If an ontology can’t distinguish important distinctions that are needed to get certain existing techniques to be effective, I don’t think there a good reason to believe that it will be useful for designing new techniques.
This is like the psychiatrists who have the same DSM-V category for a depression that’s caused by a head trauma and a depression that’s caused by someone having a burnout (the DSM is an ontology that’s designed to be cause-neutral).
If an ontology can’t distinguish important categories that matter for clinical practice from each other it can’t effectively guide actions.
Researchers at UCL, NICE, Aberdeen, Dublin and IBM are building an ontology of human behavior change techniques (BCTs). A taxonomy has already been created, detailing 93 different hierarchically clustered techniques. This taxonomy is useful in itself; I could see myself using this to try to figure out which techniques work best for me, in fostering desirable habits and eliminating undesirable ones.
The ontology could be an extremely useful instrumental rationality tool, if it helps to identify which techniques work best on average, and in which combinations these BCTs are most effective.
It might also be a ontology that’s more distorting than helpful. The ontology looks like it tries to be agnostic about mental processes and as a result makes no assumptions about the moving parts that can be effected.
If you take a technique like CFAR’s internal double crux, it doesn’t fit well into that framework.
I’m nervous about mapping elements from the taxonomy onto existing techniques. You risk rationalising this way. But, for the sake of argument, one could say that internal double crux amounts to application of BCT 1.2 (problem-solving), BCT 4.3 (re-attribution), BCT 13.2 (framing/reframing), and BCT 13.3 (internal inconsistency). There are probably other ways of making it fit; therefore, I agree that the taxonomy, as it stands, isn’t very useful.
Now, one of the stated aims of the human behaviour change project is this:
If the ontology turns out as expected, I think it’ll be useful for designing and testing new behaviour change interventions.
If an ontology can’t distinguish important distinctions that are needed to get certain existing techniques to be effective, I don’t think there a good reason to believe that it will be useful for designing new techniques.
This is like the psychiatrists who have the same DSM-V category for a depression that’s caused by a head trauma and a depression that’s caused by someone having a burnout (the DSM is an ontology that’s designed to be cause-neutral).
If an ontology can’t distinguish important categories that matter for clinical practice from each other it can’t effectively guide actions.