Promoting Compliance: Can the Four Tendencies Framework Help Change Behaviours?

The challenge of increasing adherence, particularly medical adherence, is important for many reasons including better quality of life, increased health benefit and reduction of harm. We investigate using the Four Tendencies Framework to categorise people based on how they respond to expectations in order to create tailored interventions, and assess whether this helps increase adherence. We settled on encouraging people to meditate as an appropriate neutral intervention with parallels to medication adherence but with fewer ethical and safety issues for the participants. We developed a smartphone app based on these categorisation and behavioural principles that had two different forms of intervention. The Obliger intervention consisted of a habit tracker whilst the Questioner intervention focused on informing the user of the benefits of meditation. The app notifications were also tailored. Study participants were recruited via social contacts and, of 107 people approached, 19 participated in the 28 day study and 10 completed the post-study survey. The exploratory study suggested that the app did help improve adherence to daily meditation, though no statistically significant difference betweenthe interventions was found. Qualitative results suggest that there were multiple potential confounding factors and hence further research is required. Particular points of interest from the study and survey include whether it is actually possible to design an app that distinctly appeals to a certain tendency, whether the meditation logging system was a good adherence measure, reasons for non-adherence, the impactofthegiventaskandtheimpactofthestudyaudience.