The Use of Identity Psychology

Most of our Dashometrics products are designed to simultaneously assess, intervene and provide a platform for research. In this section we would like to briefly discuss another aspect of the psychology behind our products – an aspect that can be used at the intervention level: “attribution” or “identity” psychology.

In the section on our use of the Likert Scale (The Psychology Behind Our Likert Scale Products), we have discussed how our products create numerous opportunities for the positive reinforcement of various beliefs and behaviors. We would now like to discuss how attribution or identity psychology can be used to reinforce or even create attributes or characteristics. We will also show why persuasion or didactic interventions should generally not be used. We will refer to a research study done by Miller, Brickman and Bolen in 1975 that confirms our own clinical experience with these concepts. This study compares the use of persuasion, positive reinforcement and using attributions or identification for purposes of modifying behavior. We provide a link to this study and some interpretations of it at the end of this section.
Persuasion, very simply put, is when we tell people they should do something or not do something. In therapeutic situations it often takes the form of advice giving. Positive reinforcement is when we give a reward for a specific behavior, which reward can include, but is not limited to, praise. Attribution or identification is when we say someone is something. The premise is that the feature we attribute to them is intrinsic to them. Whereas positive reinforcement, to some degree, requires the on-going provision of an external reward or “operant”, someone with an intrinsic quality does something because it is just them. The motivation is internal and not external.
In the study by Miller, Brickman and Bolen, they used elementary school class rooms as their laboratory. They compared different classrooms at the same grade level. They used reduced classroom littering and improved math skill as the target behaviors to modify. One classroom was always used as a control group with no intervention. In other classrooms, they would use either persuasion strategies, positive reinforcement strategies or attribution strategies. They created pre-intervention baseline measurements and then measured post-intervention at two time intervals. In simplest form, these researchers showed that persuasion is briefly effective or not effective at all, that a positive reinforcement group was superior to the control group and the persuasion group, and that the attribution groups were superior to even positive reinforcement.
There are several take-aways from this:

The most widely used human influence strategy is persuasion or advice giving. At Dashometrics, we believe persuasion is usually ineffective and sometimes even creates resistance. Our products – by their very nature – create an alternative so that providers can influence more effectively and experience less of the frustration associated with persuasion strategies. They provide opportunity for both positive reinforcement of behaviors and beliefs and positive identification of clients or patients.
Positive reinforcement does work. Please see our section on The Psychology Behind Our Likert Scale Products to see how easily and powerfully our products create opportunities for positive reinforcement.
Attribution or identity does work, but it is a blade that cuts two ways. Negative labeling works against us and positive labeling works for us. It is a powerful and under-utilized psychological intervention. It is not dependent on on-going extrinsic rewards and it is more efficient. A responsible person, for example, does responsible things. You don’t have to create a whole set of rewarded targeted behaviors to achieve the same breadth or scope with this strategy.
By way of example, let us take an item from our product “Social Avoidance – 1”:

“I am generally on time for meetings and appointments with people.”

Let us assume a respondent answers “Agree” on that item. Our subscriber could reinforce the behavior by saying “that’s been my experience working with you and I appreciate it”. They could then reinforce the attribute or identity by saying “You are a punctual and reliable person”.
In fact, as the tutorial we refer to below discusses, we can almost create identity out of thin air by identifying people as the way we would like them to be and treating them as if they are that way.
At Dashometrics, we believe that influence strategies are critically important. They are at the foundation of almost all our products. For this reason, as one of our complimentary products, we offer a brief tutorial on what we call “Bundling” – which is the combination of positive reinforcement and positive identity used together. Think of it – literally – as a recipe for therapeutic success. As we say on that tutorial, our therapeutic knowledge on content doesn’t mean much if we are not able to successfully influence our clients or patients.