Reframing the Role of Behavioural Interventions: Dominant Views and New Directions

Behavioural interventions are often used to tackle social issues that seem solvable with some form of behaviour change. However, increasing research points to behaviour change as a fundamentally internal process, raising questions on the limitations of current technologies to produce enduring changes. The gap between existential views of behaviour and existing technocentric solutions prompts us to review the dominant model of intervention and explore new directions to design technical intervention systems. In this paper, we utilise a sociotechnical systems approach to model and reframe the role of behavioural intervention systems. Our model integrates internal aspects of behaviour change into the operational concept of technological systems to discuss how technology could be better designed to adapt to the idiosyncratic needs of individuals and support their behaviour change processes. The resulting model represents a paradigm shift away from operational rigidity in technology development towards system architectures that account for higher-order human needs.