Recalling and Intending to Enact Health Recommendations: Optimal Number of Prescribed Behaviors in Multibehavior Messages

Two experiments investigated the effects of the number of health recommendations (e.g., quit smoking; relax for a day) contained in a health-promotion message on recommendation recall and intentions to enact the recommendations. We hypothesized that if recommendations are stored individually, a higher number of presented recommendations will increase the number of recalled recommendations. As the number of recommendations increases, however, recipients are likely to summarize more recommendations as part of a single, more general theme (or header), resulting in a decrease in the proportion of recalled recommendations. Two experiments (N = 193 and N = 266) found that the total number of recalled recommendations increased and the proportion of recalled recommendations decreased with the number of presented recommendations. Experiment 2 replicated the findings with the number and the proportion of intended behaviors. The implications of these findings for future behavioral health interventions are discussed.