Please join the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences for a Scholar Seminar Series event featuring Dr. Blair T. Johnson.
Talk Description: For decades, scholars have conducted behavioral and psychosocial interventions with well-meaning intentions to reduce morbidity and mortality. Although interventions can have considerable success, their track record in creating true, long-term behavior change is decidedly mixed, if not negative. Why? Dr. Johnson posits that two main factors combine to fight most long-term change, and they both center on the role of habits, relatively automatic tendencies that become triggered by elements in individuals’ environments, across their lifespans. The environments, in turn, are populated with networks—communities—whose habits also routinely oppose the intervention’s goals. Dr. Johnson will describe research that supports these principles, both at the individual and community levels. He will conclude by discussing other theoretical hurdles that must be cleared for interventions to create true, long-term behavior change.
Speaker Bio: Blair T. Johnson is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the University of Connecticut’s Department of Psychological Sciences, where he teaches courses related to health psychology, attitude change, meta-analysis, and psychology of the arts. Johnson has been a prominent scientific methodologist throughout his career, especially in relation to meta-analysis, which he labels “the original big data.” He has long published treatises on the best methods for meta-analysis, most recently urging systematic review teams to develop better pre-review goals, to report their methods with high transparency, and to report their results with great clarity. Other recent methods work has focused on spatiotemporal strategies to bring community- and neighborhood-level factors to bear on health behavior and health behavior change. Johnson’s Systematic Health Action Research Program (SHARP) focuses on social influence and behavioral health, especially HIV/AIDS, exercise and blood pressure, placebo responding in antidepressants, and strategies to improve mental and physical health and to promote healthy lifestyle choices. SHARP members have been awarded numerous grants from the U.S. Public Health Service and other agencies. Currently, Dr. Johnson is a Senior Editor with the journal Social Science & Medicine and editor-elect of Psychological Bulletin, a term that commences in 2020.
Lunch will be provided. Vegetarian options will be available.