If every time you disagree with someone or offer someone criticism, they take it and change, you don’t need to read the rest of this blog post.
Thomas S. Critchfield offers ten rules for changing others’ behavior and getting better at changing others’ behavior in the Association for Behavior Analysis International published by the NIH.
- The organism is always right. It’s not the person who is wrong; it’s an action or a misstatement by that person. Make that distinction clear in all communications.
- Behavior is not personal. Behavior or statements are not a matter of intention or lack of personal responsibility. They are only actions, only behavior. Do not impugn a person’s character or intent. People do not accept assistance from someone who is on the attack.
- Behavior has a function. You need to understand the rewards provided by the behavior in order to change it; what are the historical and environmental influences that lead to the behavior.
- Plan your own actions to support behavior change. Your behavior needs to be what the other person needs in order to change. What behavior could you exhibit that is most likely to result in change by the other person or group? What words or actions can you use that honor the customs and culture of, that establish rapport with, the person you are trying to change?
- Behavior changes gradually. Both in terms of you getting better at creating change and other people changing. A single suggestion is not going to make everything right. Just reading this once is not going to make you magically more persuasive.
- Pick your battles. Even when there are a lot of things that need changing, target one problem at a time, one where changes can realistically be made. For some, you won’t have enough access to them to create a change. Just move on.
- It’s easier to prevent than to fix. Ongoing behavior is difficult to change; it’s always easier to build good habits and models before they become problems. Why wait for someone to mess up when in many cases you can provide an ounce of prevention?
- Help solve problems. Behaviors result from actions that (are designed to) solve some problem. Find the pressing problems, find out about what’s important to the other person and help them solve those issues through more effective means.
- Skills become more fluent with practice. You’ll get better at this the more you do it.
- Their failure to change or learn is actually your failure to explain or teach. If you try something and it doesn’t work, reconsider how you approached changing the other person’s behavior. Focusing on how they failed to follow what you clearly communicated may make you temporarily feel absolved, but is not going to help you change people and it not going to give you the results you ultimately want.
If you have read this far, you’re probably more like me in that not every time that you offer advice do people take it. I’m hoping this article will help us all get better.
The original article applied these principles of applied behavior analysis to getting people to stop misconstruing the practice of applied behavior analysis. This essay applies them more generally.