Individual choices have limits • People aren’t empty vessels • Changing yourself to fit in

People are often asked to change their behavior to improve their health, finances, communities, or the planet. Take the bus instead of driving. Eat less meat. Use less energy. Save more. Make better choices.

But how much power does an individual have when larger forces shape the choices available to them? A renter may not be allowed to replace drafty windows in their apartment. Healthier food may cost more than a family can afford. A paycheck that barely covers the bills leaves little room for retirement savings.

In a new paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science, psychologists Gulnaz Anjum (University of Oslo and VID Specialized University) and Mudassar Aziz (UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the University of Oslo) argue that behavioral science too often overlooks these constraints, remaining “power-blind” to the systems, policies, and institutions that shape people’s choices. As a result, the field risks holding people responsible for society’s problems even when they have little power to address the causes.

“We wanted to understand why the field keeps returning to individuals and pressuring them, instead of looking at the policies and structures that fail to support them,” Anjum said.

Anjum and Aziz describe agency as a sliding scale: Everyone has some, but how much depends on their individual circumstances, personalities, and the constraints placed on them by the larger systems within which they live.

In a separate paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Jack W. Klein (Flinders University) and APS Charter Member and Fellow William B. Swann Jr. (University of Texas at Austin) argue that people are more than empty vessels waiting to be shaped by outside forces. People bring their own values, beliefs, and sense of who they are to every situation. That idea also raises questions about efforts to change the person rather than the situation.

In another paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Peter Haehner (University of Zurich), Wiebke Bleidorn (University of Zurich), and their colleagues examine programs that help people intentionally change traits, such as becoming more conscientious, outgoing, or emotionally stable. They caution that even personal goals can be shaped by outside pressures, and that not everyone has the same ability to pursue them.

Together, these studies challenge how psychologists think about individual behavior and the forces that shape it. How much can individuals accomplish on their own, what limits their choices, and when should the focus shift from changing people to changing the systems around them?

Individual choices have limits

Anjum and Aziz began questioning the limits of individual responsibility while studying people’s responses to climate change. Much of the research they encountered focused on individuals. Why weren’t people recycling more, changing their diets, or flying less?

Far fewer studies examined the governmental policies, corporate practices, and economic systems shaping those choices. The researchers soon spotted a similar pattern in public health and personal finance, where efforts to change individual behavior often overlooked broader structural problems.

Consider climate change. People are encouraged to recycle, conserve energy, and shrink their carbon footprints, even as fossil fuel companies and governments have far greater power to address the underlying causes. Anjum and Aziz point to the fossil fuel industry’s promotion of personal carbon footprints as an example of shifting responsibility from corporations to consumers. They also note that 100 fossil fuel producers have been linked to more than 70% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.

The same pattern appears in public health. The food industry spends billions developing and marketing products that encourage people to eat more. Efforts to improve eating habits often emphasize calorie labels, portion sizes, and individual self-control. Far less attention goes to how food is produced, priced, and marketed.

Even in personal finance, workers are encouraged to save more through automatic enrollment in retirement plans and financial education. These approaches can help, but they cannot address wages that aren’t keeping up with living costs or incomes that leave little money to save. In the gig economy, risks such as unstable income and lack of insurance are increasingly shifted from companies onto workers.

The problem, Anjum and Aziz argue, is not that individual choices don’t matter. It’s that people are expected to solve problems they have limited power to address and are often blamed when they fail. Across all three areas, they see the same pattern. Powerful actors frame a structural problem as a matter of individual failure. Behavioral research then locates the cause in people’s thinking. Interventions target individuals, and the costs fall on those with the least power while the structures stay in place.

“The onus of correcting ourselves is hugely on us, but we are living in a designed world where there are forces acting on us, but nobody is talking about those forces,” Aziz said.

“These industries do not engineer things only,” he continued. “They engineer choices. They engineer consent. They engineer social factors that help us consume more. And when it comes to responsibility, this responsibility is shifted to individuals.”

This gap between responsibility and power has implications for one of behavioral science’s most popular tools, the nudge. A nudge is a small change in how choices are presented, designed to encourage (or discourage) certain behaviors while leaving people free to choose otherwise. Automatically enrolling workers in retirement plans makes saving the default. A cafeteria might place healthier foods in more visible locations. A utility company might show customers how their energy use compares with their neighbors’.

“There is space for the nudge perspective,” Aziz said. But researchers should first ask whose goals a nudge serves, whether it strengthens the power of those already in control, and whether people have the means to make the desired change.

Even when it works as intended, a nudge can only make a choice easier. It cannot create an option that doesn’t exist, and it does not exist in a vacuum: Someone decides which behaviors are worth encouraging. Other behavioral scientists have also warned that the field focuses too narrowly on individuals. Anjum and Aziz argue that this critique needs to go further and put power at the center of research.

To address this imbalance, Anjum and Aziz propose the responsibility–power–justice (RPJ) nexus, a framework that brings together three connected ideas. Before trying to change people’s behavior, they argue, researchers should ask who is being held responsible for a problem and who has the power to address it. They should also consider who benefits and who bears the costs, and whether affected people have a say.

The paper includes a working guide that demonstrates how to apply these questions at each stage of a project, from choosing a research question to evaluating results. The authors also call for more research on the behavior of the powerful, such as corporate leaders and policymakers, instead of focusing almost entirely on ordinary citizens and consumers.

Fairness also affects whether interventions succeed. People’s willingness to cooperate depends partly on whether they trust the institutions asking them to change. In communities with a history of unfair treatment in health care, for example, mistrust of medical institutions can be a reasonable response to experience.

The goal is not to eliminate individual responsibility, but to ensure that efforts to change behavior account for the larger forces shaping people’s choices. That also means holding those with greater power accountable for their role in creating or solving problems. As Anjum and Aziz wrote in their paper, “What has been structured can be restructured.”

People aren’t empty vessels

Larger systems aren’t the only forces shaping behavior. Even when people face the same circumstances, they don’t necessarily respond in the same way.

For much of its history, social psychology has emphasized the power of situations to shape behavior. Some classic studies suggested that surprisingly small cues could change what people thought, felt, or did.

Related Observer issue March/April 2022: The Science of Behavior Change

Klein and Swann argue that this emphasis sometimes pushed the individual person out of the picture. They trace the tendency to early behaviorism, which focused on people’s responses to their environments while largely setting aside their thoughts, motivations, and identities. This approach encouraged what they call the “empty-self” metaphor—the assumption that people are easily shaped by outside influences.

The authors point out that much of social psychology has treated people as more like empty vessels that are filled by the contents of a situation. But people have lasting beliefs about themselves that don’t simply disappear when circumstances change.

Those beliefs may help explain why some seemingly powerful effects on behavior have proved difficult to reproduce. Consider social priming, which examines whether subtle reminders of an idea can influence what people think or do. In one famous study, researchers reported that exposing people to words associated with old age made them walk more slowly. Another suggested that holding a warm drink made people judge someone else as having a warmer personality. Subsequent attempts to reproduce these and other striking findings have often failed.

Klein and Swann wondered whether researchers had underestimated the people receiving those cues. A word, image, or physical sensation might not have the same meaning—or effect—for everyone. To investigate, they examined 41 hypotheses tested in two large replication projects. They classified nine as relying on the empty-self assumption.

None of those nine results were successfully replicated, compared with a replication rate of

81.2% for the studies that were not guided by the empty-self metaphor.

The importance of people’s existing beliefs also has implications for nudges. Early enthusiasm for nudges has been tempered by evidence that their effects are not always as strong or consistent as researchers initially hoped, prompting greater attention to when, for whom, and under what circumstances they work.

Swann said nudges may be particularly effective when people respond automatically, without thinking deeply about their choices. But “when people are motivated to reflect or introspect,” he said, “their individual differences come to the fore.”

Researchers have also explored more personalized approaches. In one study, reminders tailored to people’s priorities, such as health or price, and their preferred ways of receiving information encouraged healthier food purchases more effectively than generic reminders.

“Nudges should be matched to the individual,” Klein noted. “But even then, they might provide too weak a signal to reliably change behavior.”

Changing yourself to fit in

But what happens when the proposed solution is not simply to change someone’s behavior, but to change their personality?

In their recent paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Haehner, Bleidorn, and their colleagues examined programs that help people change aspects of their personalities to achieve personal goals, such as becoming more outgoing or more organized and responsible.

But the researchers warn that pressure to fit in at school, work, or elsewhere may influence what people want to change and their motivations for doing so. Most programs let participants choose their goals without labeling one personality as better than another. Even so, those goals may reflect what others expect.

Access also matters. These programs take time, effort, and resources that not everyone has. They could mainly benefit people who already have the means to invest in themselves.

These concerns echo Anjum and Aziz’s argument that people’s ability to change depends on more than their own efforts. Focusing too much on changing individuals can overlook the conditions that limit what they can do.

That doesn’t mean individuals bear no responsibility.

“As individuals we do have responsibility in the sense that we have to collaborate, cooperate, and as a community we need to function better,” Anjum said. “But it is not going to work if we put all the onus only on the individual.”

For psychological scientists, that may mean asking different questions. Instead of focusing only on how to change individual behavior, researchers might ask what prevents people from making those changes and who has the power to remove those barriers.

Sometimes a reminder, better information, or a well-designed nudge may help. Other times, change requires action by employers, corporations, governments, or institutions with far greater influence over people’s lives. What matters is recognizing that responsibility and power requires a collective effort.

“Individual choices are real, but they are small. Collective action is how people with little power on their own gain enough of it to change the rules,” Aziz said. “The evidence is clear that communities given real authority over their own conditions develop lasting norms of stewardship that no nudge campaign has matched. That is where we think behavioral science should be looking next.”

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References

Anjum, G., & Aziz, M. (2026). The responsibility–power–justice nexus: A framework for reorienting behavioral science toward power and justice. Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Klein, J. W., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (2026). Social psychology’s empty-self metaphor and the replication crisis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 21(2), 138–153.

Haehner, P., Asselmann, E., et.al. (2026). Ten concerns about volitional personality-change interventions—and how to address them. Perspectives on Psychological Science.