Response Latency reveals Participants’ Motivations to Join a Behavioural Change Program

Abstract

What motivates people to change their travel behaviour? In voluntary behavioural change programs, this question is typically answered by asking participants why they have joined the program. The frequency of a motivation’s citation is then considered a proxy for its importance. In this study, we propose an additional ‘proxy’ criterion to assess the psychological salience of the stated reasons, namely response latency (the time between the start of the advertising of the program and the moment of registration). Considering that the program is marketed to everyone at the same point in time, we argue that response latency can be regarded as an inverse measure of the degree of motivation to change one’s behaviour. This allows us to identify stronger and weaker motivators. We use this idea to identify the importance of particular motivations to join a behavioural change program at TU Delft.