Predicting people’s motivation to engage in urban predator control

Abstract

Measures such as education, incentives, and regulations are used to change people’s behaviour and thereby achieve policy objectives. Understanding and predicting the willingness of people to change their behaviour in response to a policy measure is critical in assessing its likely effectiveness. We apply a dual-process framework of adoption proposed by Bagozzi (2006a, b) that distinguishes between goal setting and goal striving to predict urban trapping of rats. We employ ‘involvement’, a measure of motivation from the field of marketing, to operationalise two key variables in the dual-process model: goal desire and behavioural desire. We show how the dual-process model predicts urban residents’ trapping behaviour and discuss the implications of the model for efforts to promote rat trapping by public agencies.