Behavior Change and Prosocial Decision Making

In this paper, factors that determine patterns of behavioral change are extracted based on responses to a questionnaire survey, and the relationship between patterns of behavioral change and factors of behavioral change is clarified. The behavioral change factors extracted in this paper are 1) perseverance, 2) plasticity, and 3) receptivity. Perseverance is interpreted as the ability to make efforts to acquire new knowledge and information, plasticity as the flexibility to change and implement behavior independently, and receptivity as the ability to accept and judge external information. Based on a questionnaire survey, we analyze how these behavioral change factors influence behavioral change patterns in working styles and in COVID-19 infection avoidance behavior. The results of the analysis show that in both behavioral change in working style and in infection avoidance behavior, people with high perseverance generally adopt behavior change patterns that the largest number of people find desirable, whereas people with high receptivity adopt behavior change patterns that differ significantly from those of people that exhibit high perseverance. In addition, a multiple regression analysis was conducted to examine how behavioral change factors explain changes in infection avoidance behavior in eating out two years after the first survey.