Promoting Healthy Behaviour: Evidence from Psychology

Health is a nation’s fundamental form of wealth: it is indispensable to a productive economy and is the basis of individual capacity. Ensuring the conditions conducive to population health is the purpose of public health. In this way, public health serves as both a body of knowledge and a domain of practice. During the 19th century, public health relied on such technical and scientific advancements as improved sanitation and sewage systems to tame filth and contagion in order to improve life expectancy and population wellbeing. However, coherent public health governance in Europe only emerged in response to the cholera pandemics and the population needs of rapid urban expansion, when tides of people fled the countryside in pursuit of the opportunities afforded by the Industrial Revolution. Epidemiology came to dominate public health during the mid-19th century and remains influential in contemporary public health. However, its positivist orientation proves dissatisfying, for it lacks the capacity to consider the psychological and social contributors to health. Yet moving beyond the limitations of this epidemiological orientation demands that health issues no longer be individualised and detached from their psychological and social context. To this end, epidemiology is being forced to share the stage with an approach to public health which understands that the sources of and solutions to poor health are multidimensional and that successful policy will result only if public health pays attention to the biological, psychological and social determinants of health.