Research Interests
The aim of research in my group is to develop and evaluate interventions to reduce consumption of food, alcohol and tobacco in order to improve population health and reduce health inequalities. Our focus is on changing behaviour by altering environments rather than minds, targeting non-conscious rather than conscious processes. This approach is supported by the robust observation that communicating personalised risk information has little impact on recipients’ behaviour that could reduce identified risks. We also study the acceptability to various publics of policy-makers and others re-designing our environments to remove or add cues that make healthier behaviours more likely.
Our methods include:
- Systematic reviews, to Identify promising cues in our immediate physical environments that can be altered to reduce consumption of food, alcohol or tobacco, such as portion, tableware or glass sizes.
- Laboratory studies, to understand mechanisms by which identified cues affect consumption, as a basis for optimising interventions.
- Field studies, to estimate effect sizes of interventions in real world settings.
Selected Publications
Marteau TM. (2018) Changing minds about changing behaviour. The Lancet; 391(10116):116-7; 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)33324-X. PMID: 29353612
Stautz K, Zupan Z, Field M, Marteau TM. (2018) Does self-control modify the impact of interventions to change alcohol, tobacco, and food consumption? A systematic review. Health Psychol Rev:1-41; 10.1080/17437199.2017.1421477. PMID:29291664
Hollands GJ, Bignardi G, Johnston M, Kelly MP, Ogilvie D, Petticrew M, Prestwich A, Shemilt I, Sutton S, Marteau TM. (2017) The TIPPME intervention typology for changing environments to change behaviour. Nat. Hum. Behav; 1:0140; 10.1038/s41562-017-0140.
Pechey R, Couturier DL, Hollands GJ, Mantzari E, Munafo MR, Marteau TM. (2016) Does wine glass size influence sales for on-site consumption? A multiple treatment reversal design. BMC Public Health; 16(1):390; 10.1186/s12889-016-3068-z. PMID:27268112. PMCID:PMC4896022
Hollands GJ, Shemilt I, Marteau TM, Jebb SA, Lewis HB, Wei Y, Higgins JP, Ogilvie D. (2015) Portion, package or tableware size for changing selection and consumption of food, alcohol and tobacco. Cochrane Database Syst Rev; 9:CD011045; 10.1002/14651858.CD011045.pub2. PMID:26368271. PMCID:PMC4579823
Diepeveen, S., Ling, T., Suhrcke, M., Roland, M., & Marteau, T. M. (2013). Public acceptability of government intervention to change health-related behaviours: a systematic review and narrative synthesis. BMC Public Health, 13, 756. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-13-756. PMID:23947336. PMCID:PMC3765153
Marteau, T. M., Hollands, G. J., & Fletcher, P. C. (2012). Changing human behavior to prevent disease: the importance of targeting automatic processes. Science, 337(6101), 1492-5. doi: 10.1126/science.1226918. PMID:22997327
