Addressing Barriers to Action: Increasing Cat Guardians’ Compliance with Professional Environmental Enrichment Advice

Guardians of domestic cats may seek advice from a veterinarian or professional cat behavior advisor to address problematic cat behaviors. This advice typically involves a degree of environmental enrichment, which guardians sometimes experience as an encroachment on their personal lives and living environment. This may explain why compliance with enrichment advice is often poor and problem behaviors persist. The aim of this study was to investigate how advice compliance can be increased by addressing guardians’ barriers to action. Using the Theory of Planned Behavior as a theoretical foundation, we differentiated between motivational- and capacity-related perceived behavioral control (PBC) to better understand the root of guardians’ implementation resistance. We argue that motivational PBC is a more malleable construct than capacity PBC and tested the hypothesis that motivational PBC can increase when guardians experience social pressure when other guardians hold positive beliefs about environmental enrichment (subjective norm). We conducted a survey of 221 cat guardians who were asked to imagine they had sought and received enrichment advice to address their cat’s behavioral problems. The positive or negative beliefs and actions of other cat guardians with respect to environmental enrichment were varied experimentally as a means of influencing the subjective norm. Results confirmed the prediction that exposure to others’ positive enrichment beliefs (versus negative enrichment beliefs) results in a more positive subjective norm with respect to enrichment, which subsequently increases motivational PBC and compliance intention. Although compliance intention was also predicted by capacity PBC, capacity PBC was not influenced by subjective norm, as expected. This study is the first to differentiate between motivational- and capacity-related PBC as barriers to action, which proved fruitful. Understanding the nature of clients’ implementation resistance helps practitioners select the most appropriate technique to address barriers to action. We offer several practical recommendations to this end.