Chapter Three - Social Psychology and the Fight Against AIDS: An Information–Motivation–Behavioral Skills Model for the Prediction and Promotion of Health Behavior Change

Abstract

Abstract The sudden emergence of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s created an urgent requirement to achieve rapid, voluntary, and sustained behavior change to protect individual and public health. Social psychologists, realizing the relevance of the research approaches and theoretical models that define the discipline, began applying existing research methodologies and conceptual models of attitude and behavior change and developed new models aimed at understanding, predicting, and promoting AIDS preventive behavior. This chapter explores the history of the AIDS epidemic, the unique behavior change challenges it poses, and the application of social psychological approaches in the fight against this disease. We review classical social psychological theories that have been applied to promote safer sex behavior change and describe a novel Information–Motivation–Behavioral Skills (IMB) conceptualization that was developed to strengthen efforts to understand, predict, and promote AIDS preventive behavior. The IMB model has been applied successfully to understanding and predicting AIDS risk and AIDS preventive behavior in diverse settings worldwide, and IMB model-based interventions have produced sustained improvements in AIDS preventive behavior in a wide variety of intervention settings. Applications of the IMB model across multiple health behavior domains, including the prediction and promotion of adherence to medical regimen, cardiac health, and diabetes self-management, have established the IMB model as a highly generalizable theoretical and applied approach to health behavior change.