Why do community-based education and social persuasion programs for promoting healthy lifestyle and preventing chronic disease sometimes fall short of our expectations? Why are population effects so difficult to engineer and why are they so ephemeral?

This research carried out at USC, the Claremont Graduate University, and collaborating institutions in China integrates across social, behavioral, and neurocognitive sciences to address those questions. We conclude tentatively that the answer to each of the questions may lie in individual and context variability relative to program response, and that in order to more fully address the question of prevention program response variability requires engagement and integration across several levels of science to consider the roles of social groupings, environmental selection and design, social influence processes, and brain biology.

What works in one social, cultural or organizational setting may not be so effective in another. What works for persons with certain genetic and experiential backgrounds may be totally ineffective for persons with different dispositional or personality characteristics. In a series of community/school based prevention trials carried out in markedly different southern California and central China settings, we have uncovered domains of consistent response, and other domains of substantial environment- and disposition-based response variability.

A social influences based smoking prevention program framed in collectivist values and objectives worked to prevent smoking in one cultural setting but not another. And an individualist framed social influences program worked in the setting where the collectivist program did not. But the characteristics of the particular settings, which defined program success or failure, were different from what conventional (e.g., cultural psychology) wisdom would have led us to expect. Furthermore, both within and across cultural settings, the same individual dispositional characteristics moderated or determined program effectiveness, again in ways not predicted by the common cultural and behavioral science wisdom.

In recent studies carried out both in China and the U.S. we have found affective decision deficits, with known neural underpinnings, to account for rapid progression to regular smoking and binge drinking. These deficits are akin to the dispositional characteristics found earlier to moderate prevention program effects. Subsequent brain imaging studies confirm the hypothesized regions of neural involvement. Together these findings hold promise for more effective – situation and phenotype specific – approaches to engendering and sustaining more optimal individual and population health behavior.

Why do community-based education and social persuasion programs for promoting healthy lifestyle and preventing chronic disease sometimes fall short of our expectations? Why are population effects so difficult to engineer and why are they so ephemeral? This research carried out at USC, the Claremont Graduate University, and collaborating institutions in China integrates across social, behavioral, and neurocognitive sciences to address those questions.

We conclude tentatively that the answer to each of the questions may lie in individual and context variability relative to program response, and that in order to more fully address the question of prevention program response variability requires engagement and integration across several levels of science to consider the roles of social groupings, environmental selection and design, social influence processes, and brain biology. What works in one social, cultural or organizational setting may not be so effective in another. What works for persons with certain genetic and experiential backgrounds may be totally ineffective for persons with different dispositional or personality characteristics. In a series of community/school based prevention trials carried out in markedly different southern California and central China settings, we have uncovered domains of consistent response, and other domains of substantial environment- and disposition-based response variability. A social influences based smoking prevention program framed in collectivist values and objectives worked to prevent smoking in one cultural setting but not another. And an individualist framed social influences program worked in the setting where the collectivist program did not. But the characteristics of the particular settings which defined program success or failure were different from what conventional (e.g., cultural psychology) wisdom would have led us to expect. Furthermore, both within and across cultural settings, the same individual dispositional characteristics moderated or determined program effectiveness, again in ways not predicted by the common cultural and behavioral science wisdom. In recent studies carried out both in China and the U.S. we have found affective decision deficits, with known neural underpinnings, to account for rapid progression to regular smoking and binge drinking. These deficits are akin to the dispositional characteristics found earlier to moderate prevention program effects. Subsequent brain imaging studies confirm the hypothesized regions of neural involvement. Together these findings hold promise for more effective – situation and phenotype specific – approaches to engendering and sustaining more optimal individual and population health behavior.

Kelly Moore is Associate Professor of Sociology and Affiliate of Women's Studies at the University of Cincinnati.  She is the author of Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945-1975 (Princeton University Press, 2008), and the co-editor of The New Political Sociology of Science: Institutions, Networks, and Power (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).   Her articles have appeared in Research in Organizational Sociology, American Journal of Sociology and other journals.  She currently serves as Chair of the American Sociological Association section on Science, Knowledge and Technology, and is writing a book about neoliberalism, food, and nutrition in U.S. from 1980 to 2005. 

Rebecca Slayton is a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Stanford University and a CISAC affiliate. In 2004-2005 she was a CISAC science fellow. Her research examines how technical judgments are generated, taken up, and given significance in international security contexts. She is currently working on a book which uses the history of the U.S. ballistic missile defense program to study the relationships between and among technology, expertise, and the media. Portions of this work have been published in journals such as History and Technology and have been presented at academic conferences. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2004 she completed an NSF-funded project entitled Public Science: Discourse about the Strategic Defense Initiative, 1983-1988.

As a physical chemist, she developed ultrafast laser experiments in condensed matter systems and published several articles in physics journals. She also received the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship in 2000, and has worked as a science journalist for a daily paper and for Physical Review Focus. She earned her doctorate in chemistry from Harvard University in 2002.