A study with students in residence at McGill University in Montreal showed that making a definite plan to do a health-promoting action, and then picturing yourself doing the action, is the key to changing people’s behaviour.
We all know that it’s important to eat more fruit and vegetables each day, but how many of us put that knowledge and intention into action? “Telling people to just change the way they eat doesn’t work; we’ve known that for a while,” said Associate Professor Bärbel Knäuper of McGill's Department of Psychology. “But research has shown that if people make a concrete plan about what they are going to do, they are better at acting on their intentions. What we've done that's new is to add visualization techniques to the action plan.”
Dr Knäuper studies how individuals make health related judgments such as perception of risk; how health beliefs influence health behavior; and how interventions can be restructure health-related beliefs and behaviors. She is mainly focusing on the areas of sexual health and eating behavior (dieting, obesity, diabetes).
Getting Students to Eat more Fruit
Dr Knäuper and her team asked 177 students at McGill's New Residence Hall to set themselves the goal of consuming more fruit over a period of a week. Each of the students was randomly assigned to one of four conditions: a control group; implementation intentions (planned to eat more fruit), goal intention mental imagery (visualized eating fruit) or mental imagery targeted to the implementation intentions (planning and then visualizing eating fruit).
Over the space of the week, all of the students ended up eating more fruit than they had done before. Even students in the control group improved their fruit eating rate, although they ate the least of all four groups. The students in the group shown how to target their mental imagery to their intention increased their fruit consumption the most, with the previously low fruit eaters eating up to twice as much fruit as the ones who thought about eating more but hadn’t planned or visualized their actions.
Planning and Visualizing Key to Successful Action
This type of visualization may be new to health consumers, but elite sports people are very familiar with it, Dr Knäuper said. “Athletes do lots of work mentally rehearsing their performances before competing and it’s often very successful. So we thought having people mentally rehearse how they were going to buy and eat their fruit should make it more likely that they would actually do it. And this is exactly what happened.”
Each student in the targeted mental imagery group first wrote a detailed plan of how they were going to consume more fruit over the seven days. The plan included when, where and how they would buy the fruit, how and when they would prepare it, and when and where they would eat it.
They then visualized putting their personal plan into action, mentally rehearsing all the steps. Dr Knäuper said the study showed that targeted mental imagery of a carefully planned action could be a simple yet effective means of changing eating habits.
The study, "Fruitful plans: Adding targeted mental imagery to implementation intentions increases fruit consumption," was published online in the March 2011 edition of Psychology and Health.
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Sue Cartledge - I'm a science, health, nutrition and lifestyle journalist, fascinated by the way the physical world operates in all its forms, and how ...
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