Empowering interventions to promote sustainable lifestyles: Testing the habit discontinuity hypothesis in a field experiment
Verplanken and Roy report a field experiment on whether an intervention promoting sustainable behaviour works better for people going through a life transition such as moving house. Half the households in each of two conditions, intervention and no-intervention control, had recently relocated, and each was matched with a household that had not. Eight hundred people took part. Self-reported frequency of 25 environment-related behaviours was measured at baseline and eight weeks later, with past behaviour, habit strength, intentions, perceived control, values, personal norms and personal involvement controlled. The intervention was more effective among recent movers than among non-movers, and the authors describe the effect as lasting about three months after relocation.
Verplanken and Roy report a field experiment on whether an intervention promoting sustainable behaviour works better for people going through a life transition such as moving house. Half the households in each of two conditions, intervention and no-intervention control, had recently relocated, and each was matched with a household that had not. Eight hundred people took part. Self-reported frequency of 25 environment-related behaviours was measured at baseline and eight weeks later, with past behaviour, habit strength, intentions, perceived control, values, personal norms and personal involvement controlled. The intervention was more effective among recent movers than among non-movers, and the authors describe the effect as lasting about three months after relocation.
Written from the abstract and repository record (University of Bath research portal), 2026-11-03.
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Verplanken, B., & Roy, D. (2016). Empowering interventions to promote sustainable lifestyles: Testing the habit discontinuity hypothesis in a field experiment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 45, 127-134. doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.11.008