Robert Aunger
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 626177 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Robert Aunger |
| NOMBRES | Robert |
| APELLIDO | Aunger |
| FIRMA | AUNGER R |
| AFILIACIONES | London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8136-9376 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 36 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 155 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 36 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1989 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
A framework for strengthening realist synthesis and evaluation by integrating behavioural science
Understanding the mechanisms and contexts that drive the success of complex health interventions remains a challenge. Realist methods, grounded in scientific realism, generate context-sensitive programme theories to explain how, why and for whom interventions work, but these theories often lack structured operationalisation to inform comparison or intervention design. Behavioural science, by contrast, systematically identifies and modifies behavi…
Can behavioral science advance breastfeeding-friendly primary care? Key findings from an evaluation in Kosovo
Breastfeeding is a cost-effective intervention vital to child health, yet rates remain suboptimal, especially in fragile settings. Primary care providers are critical to improving breastfeeding outcomes but face multilevel barriers. While hospital-based interventions have shown success, adaptations to primary care are limited, and understanding of the mechanisms driving provider behavior change remains insufficient. In Kosovo, where exclusive bre…
Testing the human superorganism approach to morality
Current theories in moral psychology do not agree about the kinds and range of offenses that people should moralize. In this study, a new approach to defining the moral domain, Human Superorganism Theory (HSoT), is presented and tested. HSoT proposes that the primary function of moral action is the suppression of cheaters in the unusually large societies recently established by our species (i.e., human 'superorganisms'). It suggests that a broad …
Understanding Mass Panic
Mass panics can arise in response to a variety of situations, such as the spread of pathogens, bank failures, or insecurities about economic supplies. Such panics can produce contagious behaviors such as fleeing social contacts, bank withdrawals, and panic buying. In such situations, the processing of external stimuli, mediated by the perceptions and biases of the individual, can reach a threshold point at which panic behaviors are triggered. Due…
What works in sanitation promotion?
Promotion appears to be the least effective but is nevertheless often the only available, means to achieve increased access to sanitation services, especially at scale, in lower-income countries. A cursory examination of the history of past and present approaches to sanitation promotion, including sanitation marketing, community development, community-led total sanitation and public health, shows that they have a variety of features and character…
Intervention design in public health
Few case studies exist in the public health or design literatures showing how to create national scale messaging campaigns in low-income countries using design processes. In this paper, we describe how we used Behaviour Centred Design to develop Nyumba ni choo, the Tanzanian National Sanitation Campaign. The process involved multiple iterations of ideation and filtration by professional creatives, government staff, academics and sanitation specia…
Lessons from a successful national sanitation programme
Universal access to hygienic sanitation is a Sustainable Development Goal for international development. However, many countries are liable to miss this target by the deadline of 2030. As provision and subsidy are prohibitively expensive, promotion is the tactic commonly taken by governments and stakeholders in many countries, even though it is often not effective at generating significant changes in sanitation coverage. A recent 5-year programme…
How to set up government-led national hygiene communication campaigns to combat Covid-19
While large-scale changes in population behaviour are required to reduce the transmission of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 virus, the emergency context is not conducive to the sort of careful communications planning that would normally be required to meet such a task. Rapid strategic communications planning in a pandemic by governments is, however, possible and necessary. Steps include setting up a dedicated communications t…
Cluster-randomised trial to test the effect of a behaviour change intervention on toilet use in rural India
The trial was registered on the RIDIE registry ( RIDIE-STUDY-ID-5b8568ac80c30 , 27-8-2018) and retrospectively on clinicaltrials.gov ( NCT04526171 , 30-8-2020)
Understanding demand for higher quality sanitation in peri-urban Lusaka, Zambia through stated and revealed preference analysis
Poor peri-urban sanitation is a significant public health problem, likely to become more important as the world rapidly urbanizes. However, little is known about the role of consumer demand in increasing peri-urban sanitation quality, especially for tenants using shared sanitation as only their rental choices can be observed in the market. We analyzed data on existing housing markets collected between 9 Jun and 6 Jul 2017 using the Hedonic Pricin…
Behaviour settings theory applied to domestic water use in Nigeria
Exploratory study of the impact of perceived reward on habit formation
Pleasure and intrinsic motivation can aid habit formation through promoting greater increase in habit strength per behaviour repetition. Perceived reward can therefore reinforce habits, beyond the impact of reward upon repetition. Habit-formation interventions may be most successful where target behaviours are pleasurable or intrinsically valued
Moral Action as Cheater Suppression in Human Superorganisms
Developments in human technology and social organization have enabled the kinds of social roles that individuals can undertake to proliferate – creating a degree of interdependence not seen in other species. Human societies cannot rely on shared genetic interests or dyadic reciprocity to ensure social cohesion because genetic similarity is low while indirect reciprocity is rife; nevertheless, such societies cohere, due to the evolution of novel r…
Effect of a behaviour-change intervention on handwashing with soap in India (SuperAmma)
BACKGROUND: Diarrhoea and respiratory infections are the two biggest causes of child death globally. Handwashing with soap could substantially reduce diarrhoea and respiratory infections, but prevalence of adequate handwashing is low. We tested whether a scalable village-level intervention based on emotional drivers of behaviour, rather than knowledge, could improve handwashing behaviour in rural India. METHODS: The study was done in Chittoor dis…
Implementing effective hygiene promotion
The SuperAmma intervention is capable of achieving good reach across men and women of varied social and economic status, is affordable, and has the potential to be effective at scale, provided that sufficient attention is given to ensuring the quality of intervention delivery
The context and practice of handwashing among new mothers in Serang, Indonesia
Developing interventions to change perceptions and practice of handwashing would seed an important behaviour and could save lives. New mothers represent an ideal target group for such an intervention. We suggest that interventions target an increase in handwashing with soap after contact with own and a baby's faecal matter as part of the post-defecation hygiene routines. As the child's grandmother is an authoritative source of information about p…
Memes
The meme is a recently coined name for an old idea: one that explains how culture evolves through a process of inheritance involving bits of information. A meme is thus considered to be analogous to a gene as the unit of cultural, as opposed to genetic, evolution. Some memeticists believe that inheritance is enough to define replication. This article also uses the term ‘imitation’ in the broad sense. However, this is not a definition of imitation…
Causal chain mapping
Many public health programmes require individuals to comply with particular behaviours that are novel to them, for example, acquiring new eating habits, accepting immunizations or taking a new medication. In particular, mass drug administration programmes only work to reduce the prevalence of a disease if significant proportions of the target population take the drug in question. In such cases, knowledge of the factors most likely to lead to high…
Disgust as an adaptive system for disease avoidance behaviour
Disgust is an evolved psychological system for protecting organisms from infection through disease avoidant behaviour. This ‘behavioural immune system’, present in a diverse array of species, exhibits universal features that orchestrate hygienic behaviour in response to cues of risk of contact with pathogens. However, disgust is also a dynamic adaptive system. Individuals show variation in pathogen avoidance associated with psychological traits l…
Three kinds of psychological determinants for hand-washing behaviour in Kenya
Planned, motivated and habitual hygiene behaviour
Handwashing with soap (HWWS) may be one of the most cost-effective means of preventing infection in developing countries. However, HWWS is rare in these settings. We reviewed the results of formative research studies from 11 countries so as to understand the planned, motivated and habitual factors involved in HWWS. On average, only 17% of child caretakers HWWS after the toilet. Handwash 'habits' were generally not inculcated at an early age. Key …
Experimental Pretesting of Hand-Washing Interventions in a Natural Setting
Objectives. We pretested interventions derived from different domains of behavior change theory to determine their effectiveness at increasing hand washing with soap in a natural setting. Methods. We installed wireless devices in highway service station restrooms to record entry and soap use. Two text-only messages for each of 7 psychological domains were compared for their effect on soap-use rates. We collected data on nearly 200 000 restroom us…
Reflexive Ethnographic Science
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Chapter 1: A Crisis of Confidence Chapter 3 Chapter 2: Increasing the Reliability of Representations Chapter 4 Chapter 3: Ethnographic Variation in Practice Chapter 5 Chapter 4: The Wrong Way Out: Typology and Idealism Chapter 6 Chapter 5: Reflexive Analysis: A New Way of Doing Ethnography Chapter 7 Chapter 6: The Reliability of Reflexive Analysis Chapter 8 Chapter 7: The Strength of Belief Chapter 9 Chapter 8: To…
Exposure versus Susceptibility in the Epidemiology of "Everyday" Beliefs
This paper shows that epidemiology, an approach developed to study the social communication of biological information, can be instructively applied to the diffusion of "endemic" cultural beliefs. In particular, I examine whether exposure to information (as determined by physical and social access), or susceptibility to belief (a variety of cognitive biases underlying belief adoption) is more important in determining the distribution of food taboo…
The Many Sides of Asymmetry
Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms, and Cultures. Chris McManus. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2002; 432 pp. In an age when popular science books seem to be written about just about anything—there are several currently circulating, for instance, on the topic of coffee, and two on the role of cod in world history—we have here an entry that discusses an apparently idiosyncratic and potentially trivial to…
The Life History of Culture Learning in a Face-to-Face Society
This article identifies the temporal sequence during which important cultural beliefs (food taboos) are transmitted to individuals in an oral society living in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Results are based on patterns of correlation in scaled measures of cultural similarity between same-household and same-clan members. In the first phase of the cultural life history (zero to ten years of age), individuals are innocent of food taboos. In Pha…
On Ethnography
Net hunters vs. archers
Women's strategies to alleviate nutritional stress in a rural African society
Cultural Consensus as as a Statistical Model
Are Food Avoidances Maladaptive in the Ituri Forest of Zaire
A rigorous case study concerning the maladaptiveness of a belief system is presented with respect to food avoidances among horticulturalists and Pygmy foragers living in the Ituri Forest of Zaire. Results indicate that only one of the four ethnic groups suffers any selective disadvantage from these cultural beliefs. Furthermore, the reduction in fitness, which occurs primarily through compromised fertility in women, is probably less than 5 percen…
Experimental Pretesting of Hand-Washing Interventions in a Natural Setting
Objectives. We pretested interventions derived from different domains of behavior change theory to determine their effectiveness at increasing hand washing with soap in a natural setting. Methods. We installed wireless devices in highway service station restrooms to record entry and soap use. Two text-only messages for each of 7 psychological domains were compared for their effect on soap-use rates. We collected data on nearly 200 000 restroom us…
Sources of Variation in Ethnographic Interview Data
Traditionally, ethnographic researchers have relied heavily on the interview as a method of collecting data (Bernard 1988:203). This prevalence of interviewing is not just characteristic of anthropology: Certairnly, the survey-interview is the best-known method of data-collection in the social sciences (Dijkstra and van der Zouwen 1982:2). As a result, there is a vast literature on how to conduct interviews effectively (e.g., Bradburn et al. 1979…
Significance of the social relationships of Efe Pygmy men in the Ituri forest, Zaire
Efe Pygmies in northeast Zaire exhibit features of social organization (small group size, flexible but predominantly patrilocal residence, close relations with kin, and pair bonds) that are common to many hunting and gathering societies. This study uses methods commonly employed in studies of nonhuman primates to investigate the associations of Efe men with other individuals as a function of their age, sex, and kinship, and it tests the hypothesi…
Behaviour settings theory applied to domestic water use in Nigeria
Three kinds of psychological determinants for hand-washing behaviour in Kenya
Humans as primates
Understanding demand for higher quality sanitation in peri-urban Lusaka, Zambia through stated and revealed preference analysis
Poor peri-urban sanitation is a significant public health problem, likely to become more important as the world rapidly urbanizes. However, little is known about the role of consumer demand in increasing peri-urban sanitation quality, especially for tenants using shared sanitation as only their rental choices can be observed in the market. We analyzed data on existing housing markets collected between 9 Jun and 6 Jul 2017 using the Hedonic Pricin…
Moral Action as Cheater Suppression in Human Superorganisms
Developments in human technology and social organization have enabled the kinds of social roles that individuals can undertake to proliferate – creating a degree of interdependence not seen in other species. Human societies cannot rely on shared genetic interests or dyadic reciprocity to ensure social cohesion because genetic similarity is low while indirect reciprocity is rife; nevertheless, such societies cohere, due to the evolution of novel r…
Exposure versus Susceptibility in the Epidemiology of "Everyday" Beliefs
This paper shows that epidemiology, an approach developed to study the social communication of biological information, can be instructively applied to the diffusion of "endemic" cultural beliefs. In particular, I examine whether exposure to information (as determined by physical and social access), or susceptibility to belief (a variety of cognitive biases underlying belief adoption) is more important in determining the distribution of food taboo…
Net hunters vs. archers
Significance of the social relationships of Efe Pygmy men in the Ituri forest, Zaire
Efe Pygmies in northeast Zaire exhibit features of social organization (small group size, flexible but predominantly patrilocal residence, close relations with kin, and pair bonds) that are common to many hunting and gathering societies. This study uses methods commonly employed in studies of nonhuman primates to investigate the associations of Efe men with other individuals as a function of their age, sex, and kinship, and it tests the hypothesi…
Humans as primates
The nutritional consequences of rejecting food in the Ituri Forest of Zaire
Sources of Variation in Ethnographic Interview Data
Traditionally, ethnographic researchers have relied heavily on the interview as a method of collecting data (Bernard 1988:203). This prevalence of interviewing is not just characteristic of anthropology: Certairnly, the survey-interview is the best-known method of data-collection in the social sciences (Dijkstra and van der Zouwen 1982:2). As a result, there is a vast literature on how to conduct interviews effectively (e.g., Bradburn et al. 1979…
Are Food Avoidances Maladaptive in the Ituri Forest of Zaire
A rigorous case study concerning the maladaptiveness of a belief system is presented with respect to food avoidances among horticulturalists and Pygmy foragers living in the Ituri Forest of Zaire. Results indicate that only one of the four ethnic groups suffers any selective disadvantage from these cultural beliefs. Furthermore, the reduction in fitness, which occurs primarily through compromised fertility in women, is probably less than 5 percen…
On Ethnography
Acculturation and the Persistence of Indigenous Food Avoidances in the Ituri Forest, Zaire
A biocultural evolutionary approach is used to investigate whether acculturation is leading to the demise of food avoidances in a population of foragers and horticulturalists living in the Ituri Forest of Zaire. Multivariate statistical models, based on variation in these traditional cultural beliefs as well as their nutritional consequences, show that schooling and Christianity (the primary acculturating forces introduced into the area by Wester…
Women's strategies to alleviate nutritional stress in a rural African society
Cultural Consensus as as a Statistical Model
The Life History of Culture Learning in a Face-to-Face Society
This article identifies the temporal sequence during which important cultural beliefs (food taboos) are transmitted to individuals in an oral society living in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Results are based on patterns of correlation in scaled measures of cultural similarity between same-household and same-clan members. In the first phase of the cultural life history (zero to ten years of age), individuals are innocent of food taboos. In Pha…
Exposure versus Susceptibility in the Epidemiology of "Everyday" Beliefs
This paper shows that epidemiology, an approach developed to study the social communication of biological information, can be instructively applied to the diffusion of "endemic" cultural beliefs. In particular, I examine whether exposure to information (as determined by physical and social access), or susceptibility to belief (a variety of cognitive biases underlying belief adoption) is more important in determining the distribution of food taboo…
The Many Sides of Asymmetry
Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms, and Cultures. Chris McManus. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2002; 432 pp. In an age when popular science books seem to be written about just about anything—there are several currently circulating, for instance, on the topic of coffee, and two on the role of cod in world history—we have here an entry that discusses an apparently idiosyncratic and potentially trivial to…
Reflexive Ethnographic Science
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Chapter 1: A Crisis of Confidence Chapter 3 Chapter 2: Increasing the Reliability of Representations Chapter 4 Chapter 3: Ethnographic Variation in Practice Chapter 5 Chapter 4: The Wrong Way Out: Typology and Idealism Chapter 6 Chapter 5: Reflexive Analysis: A New Way of Doing Ethnography Chapter 7 Chapter 6: The Reliability of Reflexive Analysis Chapter 8 Chapter 7: The Strength of Belief Chapter 9 Chapter 8: To…
Planned, motivated and habitual hygiene behaviour
Handwashing with soap (HWWS) may be one of the most cost-effective means of preventing infection in developing countries. However, HWWS is rare in these settings. We reviewed the results of formative research studies from 11 countries so as to understand the planned, motivated and habitual factors involved in HWWS. On average, only 17% of child caretakers HWWS after the toilet. Handwash 'habits' were generally not inculcated at an early age. Key …
Experimental Pretesting of Hand-Washing Interventions in a Natural Setting
Objectives. We pretested interventions derived from different domains of behavior change theory to determine their effectiveness at increasing hand washing with soap in a natural setting. Methods. We installed wireless devices in highway service station restrooms to record entry and soap use. Two text-only messages for each of 7 psychological domains were compared for their effect on soap-use rates. We collected data on nearly 200 000 restroom us…
Three kinds of psychological determinants for hand-washing behaviour in Kenya
Disgust as an adaptive system for disease avoidance behaviour
Disgust is an evolved psychological system for protecting organisms from infection through disease avoidant behaviour. This ‘behavioural immune system’, present in a diverse array of species, exhibits universal features that orchestrate hygienic behaviour in response to cues of risk of contact with pathogens. However, disgust is also a dynamic adaptive system. Individuals show variation in pathogen avoidance associated with psychological traits l…
Memes
The meme is a recently coined name for an old idea: one that explains how culture evolves through a process of inheritance involving bits of information. A meme is thus considered to be analogous to a gene as the unit of cultural, as opposed to genetic, evolution. Some memeticists believe that inheritance is enough to define replication. This article also uses the term ‘imitation’ in the broad sense. However, this is not a definition of imitation…
Causal chain mapping
Many public health programmes require individuals to comply with particular behaviours that are novel to them, for example, acquiring new eating habits, accepting immunizations or taking a new medication. In particular, mass drug administration programmes only work to reduce the prevalence of a disease if significant proportions of the target population take the drug in question. In such cases, knowledge of the factors most likely to lead to high…
The context and practice of handwashing among new mothers in Serang, Indonesia
Developing interventions to change perceptions and practice of handwashing would seed an important behaviour and could save lives. New mothers represent an ideal target group for such an intervention. We suggest that interventions target an increase in handwashing with soap after contact with own and a baby's faecal matter as part of the post-defecation hygiene routines. As the child's grandmother is an authoritative source of information about p…
Effect of a behaviour-change intervention on handwashing with soap in India (SuperAmma)
BACKGROUND: Diarrhoea and respiratory infections are the two biggest causes of child death globally. Handwashing with soap could substantially reduce diarrhoea and respiratory infections, but prevalence of adequate handwashing is low. We tested whether a scalable village-level intervention based on emotional drivers of behaviour, rather than knowledge, could improve handwashing behaviour in rural India. METHODS: The study was done in Chittoor dis…
Implementing effective hygiene promotion
The SuperAmma intervention is capable of achieving good reach across men and women of varied social and economic status, is affordable, and has the potential to be effective at scale, provided that sufficient attention is given to ensuring the quality of intervention delivery
Moral Action as Cheater Suppression in Human Superorganisms
Developments in human technology and social organization have enabled the kinds of social roles that individuals can undertake to proliferate – creating a degree of interdependence not seen in other species. Human societies cannot rely on shared genetic interests or dyadic reciprocity to ensure social cohesion because genetic similarity is low while indirect reciprocity is rife; nevertheless, such societies cohere, due to the evolution of novel r…
Exploratory study of the impact of perceived reward on habit formation
Pleasure and intrinsic motivation can aid habit formation through promoting greater increase in habit strength per behaviour repetition. Perceived reward can therefore reinforce habits, beyond the impact of reward upon repetition. Habit-formation interventions may be most successful where target behaviours are pleasurable or intrinsically valued
Psychology (18 obras) · Medicine (17 obras) · Sociology (17 obras) · Social Psychology (14 obras) · Child Nutrition and Water Access (12 obras) · Environmental health (12 obras) · Population (10 obras) · Geography (9 obras) · Nursing (9 obras) · Political science (9 obras)