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Review
. 2016 Aug;20(3):245-68.
doi: 10.1177/1088868315592334. Epub 2015 Jul 10.

The Impact of Asking Intention or Self-Prediction Questions on Subsequent Behavior: A Meta-Analysis

Chantelle Wood  1 , Mark Conner  2 , Eleanor Miles  3 , Tracy Sandberg  2 , Natalie Taylor  4 , Gaston Godin  5 , Paschal Sheeran  6
Affiliations
Review

The Impact of Asking Intention or Self-Prediction Questions on Subsequent Behavior: A Meta-Analysis

Chantelle Wood et al. Pers Soc Psychol Rev. 2016 Aug.

Abstract

The current meta-analysis estimated the magnitude of the impact of asking intention and self-prediction questions on rates of subsequent behavior, and examined mediators and moderators of this question-behavior effect (QBE). Random-effects meta-analysis on 116 published tests of the effect indicated that intention/prediction questions have a small positive effect on behavior (d+ = 0.24). Little support was observed for attitude accessibility, cognitive dissonance, behavioral simulation, or processing fluency explanations of the QBE. Multivariate analyses indicated significant effects of social desirability of behavior/behavior domain (larger effects for more desirable and less risky behaviors), difficulty of behavior (larger effects for easy-to-perform behaviors), and sample type (larger effects among student samples). Although this review controls for co-occurrence of moderators in multivariate analyses, future primary research should systematically vary moderators in fully factorial designs. Further primary research is also needed to unravel the mechanisms underlying different variants of the QBE.

Keywords: behavior change; mere-measurement effect; meta-analysis; question–behavior effect; self-prophecy effect.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Literature search flow diagram. Note. QBE = question–behavior effect.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Funnel plot of effect sizes.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Weighted effect size (d+) at each level of behavior difficulty. Note. Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.
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