Integral Theory's Four Quadrants Might Make A Good Theory (The Theory of Planned Behavior) Better

I just read an article on promoting health enhancing habits in the workplace by Anshel & Kang in a recent issue of Consulting Psychology Journal.  To be frank, this is not the most rigorous of the journals published by the American Psychological Association.  Consulting psychologists like myself, I’ve concluded, simply don’t have as much time to dedicate to the refinement of their work.  Also, to be frank, a number of the articles seem to be limited to n=1 case studies of the authors’ experience with a single organization. That being said, there is a real-world quality to some of the articles that is missing from the more purely academic, higher-quality journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology.  

So I read it.  And learn.

What was particularly interesting to me about this one was that the authors sought to influence members of a target audience (employees) to change their behaviors so that they can be both more effective at their jobs and healthier.  When doing my doctoral dissertation, I decided to use, as my organizing model for influencing decision-making, Fishbein & Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB).  

The simplest explanation of TPB is that we humans decide to act in a certain way as a result of three buckets of influences:

• our attitude about the behavior (is it a good idea on its own merits?),
• our belief about our subjective norms (what will people whose opinions matter to me think about my choice?) and
• our beliefs about perceived control (is the situation controllable?  Do I have the necessary skills to actually do the behavior?).  

These three buckets “soak up a lot of variance” – geek-talk for “explain a lot of the reasons for behaviors.”  That makes it a good model.

So, what did Anshel and Kang say that resonated?  Check this out: “there are three factors that affect adherence [to a new course of behavior]: the individual (i.e., what he or she brings to the treatment), the interpersonal (i.e., others involved with that individual), and the environment (i.e., the context in which the individual lives, works, and participates) [citing Ockene, 2001].  

Well, “individual” sounds a lot like “attitude”, “interpersonal” sounds like “subjective norms”, and “the environment” sounds – at least if you take out the self-efficacy piece – like “perceived control”.  

OK, all you social scientists – I know they’re not the same constructs – just that they seem to be talking about the same domains.  

What’s kind of intriguing to me is that both TPB and Ockene’s approach seem to posit a triune model that, not surprisingly, is like the triune version of the all-quadrant dimension of Wilber’s AQAL Integral Theory: “I”, “you/we”, and “it/its”.  
And, what I also notice is that I have the same problems with this triune model that I always have – I have never understood why we should move from four to three pieces in the model.  I think we lose something in the process.  Let me demonstrate by positing a new “All-Quadrant Theory of Planned Behavior”, if Messrs Wilber, Fishbein, and Ajzen will forgive me (or even if they won’t):  

If you want to understand why a person decides to perform a behavior, you need to understand four things:

• The individual’s behavior on this and other dimensions of his/her life (upper right in the IT quadrant model)
• The systems and structures within which that behavior arises (lower right)
• The relevant intersubjective space in which the individual operates (lower left) and
• The individual’s interior, i.e. attitudes, motivations, knowledge, and values (upper left).  

So, why is this better than TPB?  Well, as the results of my research with physicians have tended to show, self-efficacy seems to operate quite differently than perceived controllability which, in TPB, are lumped together into “control beliefs”.  We may gain some theoretical clarity if we move self-efficacy up to the upper left quadrant where IT says it belongs.  

Of course, the TPB folks may say that self-efficacy should be distinguished from attitudes about the behavior itself.  Maybe so.  But maybe not.  I haven’t (and am not likely any time soon to) run large-n studies to parse this.  I’m not seeking tenure with a university, so it’s not a high priority.  What is important to me is gaining sufficient clarity so that I can understand it well enough to (1) talk to my clients about it and (2) design effective interventions for my clients.  

This IT-inspired distinction that adds the fourth quadrant seems to help in this regard.  Any long-time student of Wilber’s work likely will not be surprised by this.