The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) program aims to improve our understanding of human behavior change across a broad range of health-related behaviors. The core mission of SOBC is to bring basic, clinical, and translational scientists across disciplines together-- to identify the underlying neural, cognitive, affective, interpersonal, and environmental mechanisms that bring about behavior change. SOBC has proposed a rigorous experimental medicine approach to serve as the framework for identifying the mechanisms that drive behavior change, and for communicating scientific advances across disciplines. The SOBC Resource and Coordinating Center (RCC; https://scienceofbehaviorchange.org/) continues to develop and nurture a large network of scientists who employ the experimental medicine approach to (1) identify hypothesized mechanisms of behavior change, (2) develop reliable measures of those mechanisms, (3) conduct experiments to influence those mechanisms, and/or (4) test whether influencing a hypothesized mechanism indeed yields behavior change. All scientists interested in viewing, downloading, or contributing measures for use in behavioral science, or related fields, should visit the SOBC Repository (https://measures.scienceofbehaviorchange.org/). The SOBC program facilitates open behavioral science, and the SOBC Repository is designed to help researchers conduct behavioral science that is rigorous, reproducible, and transparent, both by offering measures with detailed validation data to aid in cross-disciplinary measurement consistency, and by making preregistration and documentation to the Open Science Framework simple. Details of all the SOBC projects are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/zp7b4/). The SOBC RCC was previously funded by the NIH Common Fund (https://commonfund.nih.gov/behaviorchange), and is now supported directly by many institutes across the NIH.

For more information email: Lilly Derby at iinfo@scienceofbehaviorchange.org.

Here are webinars presented by SOBC in collaboration with APA Division 12: