Inauthentic Action

Dr Darren Coppin's doctoral research at the Australian Catholic University (PhD by Publication, 2018, supervised by Professor Joseph Ciarrochi, Professor Baljinder Sahdra, and Professor Felicia Huppert of the University of Cambridge) was the first operationalisation of the Transtheoretical Model of Change (TTM) for general unemployment populations. Prior applications of TTM had focused predominantly on:

• Smoking cessation (Prochaska's original work, 1982 onwards)
• Other addictive-behaviour cessation (alcohol, drug use, gambling)
• Healthcare compliance (mammography screening attendance, medication adherence)
• Reducing domestic violence

A small number of prior studies had applied TTM to specific unemployment subpopulations:

• The URICA-VC (University of Rhode Island Change Assessment for Vocational Counsellors), developed by Levesque, Prochaska and colleagues in 2002, applied to 150 participants off work due to workplace injury
• The LASER (Lam Assessment of Stages of Readiness), developed by Lam et al. in 2010, applied to 150 US welfare participants (98.2% female, 83% African American)

Neither addressed general unemployment populations in Australian or comparable welfare contexts. Coppin's research design adapted the URICA-VC for general unemployment and extended it to substantially larger and more demographically diverse samples.

In Coppin's first published study (2017, Journal of Rehabilitation), administering the adapted 12-item survey to 1,213 unemployed adults, the data revealed an unexpected pattern. Approximately 20% of participants scored above the diagnostic threshold for both Action and Precontemplation simultaneously. In any other application of TTM (smoking, drug cessation, mammography), this pattern simply did not appear. People who said they had no intention to give up smoking did not, at the same time, attend smoking cessation appointments and complete nicotine replacement therapy.

Yet in unemployment data, roughly one in five jobseekers were doing exactly the equivalent: attending appointments at employment service providers, sending off applications, completing training courses (CV writing, barista courses, forklift driver courses), and turning up to interviews, while simultaneously responding that they had no genuine commitment, confidence, or desire to find or hold down a job.

The pattern, Coppin discovered through subsequent collaboration with the University of Rhode Island team and his ACU supervisors, had two underlying drivers. First, coercion: Australian, UK, and US welfare regimes condition benefit payments on demonstrated job-search activity, creating a strong external incentive to perform action behaviours regardless of internal commitment. Second, identity attachment, particularly strong among men: in cultures where masculine identity is closely linked to employment status, admitting publicly to disengagement from jobseeking carries social costs that lead participants to maintain the appearance of action.

Coppin termed this previously undocumented stage “unauthentic action” in his 2017 paper. The ethyx product literature standardises on Inauthentic Action to better capture the contemporary use of the concept across hiring surveys and retention prediction, where the coercive context (workplace expectations, social desirability bias in surveys) differs from the welfare context but produces structurally identical response patterns.

In the 2016 PhD Confirmation seminar, Coppin also characterised the pattern as a form of defensive action unique to coerced behaviour-change contexts — a related label to the published “unauthentic action” term, not a separate construct.

In standard psychometric surveys, these two clusters of responses should be mutually exclusive. A respondent scoring high on “I am actively looking for work” and low on “I have no intention of looking for work” is in the Action stage. A respondent showing the inverse is in Precontemplation. The simultaneous high score on both clusters, robustly observed across over 24,000 Australian jobseekers in Coppin's research, indicates a third pattern that classical TTM did not anticipate.

Why response patterns reveal the pattern

The 12-item survey Coppin developed deliberately included reverse-coded items asking the same underlying question from opposite directions. Items such as:

• “I am working really hard to find a job” (forward-coded, Action)
• “I am actively looking for a job” (forward-coded, Action)
• “I am following up on job leads” (forward-coded, Action)
• “I believe I might be slightly worse off financially if I start employment” (reverse-coded for Action, surfacing latent disengagement)

Respondents in genuine Action stage answer these consistently in the action direction. Respondents in genuine Precontemplation answer consistently in the precontemplation direction. Respondents in Inauthentic Action answer the visible action items consistently with action (attending appointments, sending applications) and the latent items inconsistently, often surfacing the underlying disengagement on questions where social desirability cues are weaker.

This response-pattern analysis is the methodological foundation that ethyx now applies to commercial hiring and retention surveys, where structurally identical patterns emerge in candidates and new hires whose visible engagement masks latent disengagement.

The order in which Inauthentic Action sits in this expanded model is not strictly sequential. It does not represent a normal developmental progression; it represents a stable parallel state that some individuals occupy for extended periods, particularly under sustained coercion. Some Inauthentic Action participants progress to genuine Action when underlying barriers (motivation, confidence, well-being) are addressed. Others remain in Inauthentic Action indefinitely, accumulating training credentials and visible job-search history without securing or retaining employment.

Coppin's research identified a strong male bias in Inauthentic Action prevalence. Possible explanations, developed through collaboration with the University of Rhode Island team and ACU supervisors:

• Identity attachment to employment is empirically stronger for men than women in most Western cultures, increasing the cost of admitted disengagement
• Performative compliance norms(the social pressure to “look like a hard worker” regardless of internal state) operate more strongly on men in many workplace cultures
• Help-seeking inhibition is more common in men, with admission of confidence deficits or motivational difficulties associated with gendered shame
• Coercion responses may differ by gender, with women more likely to disclose ambivalence in interviewer-led settings while men maintain action appearances

Each of these factors contributes a partial explanation; the full causal model remains an active area of research.

Coppin's 2018 YES Summit address presented Australian Department of Employment data showing that under-21 unemployed Australians were substantially less likely to score in Inauthentic Action than over-21s. The conventional Canberra wisdom assumed young people emerge from school in entitled “management material” Action stages. The data showed the opposite: under-21s were more often in Preparation (genuinely wanting work but lacking confidence in skills and themselves) and Contemplation (open to work but not yet motivated to act), with substantially lower rates of the Inauthentic Action pattern.

The hypothesis is that Inauthentic Action accumulates over years of repeated rejection by the labour market and prolonged exposure to compliance regimes. Younger jobseekers have not yet been exposed to the conditions that produce the pattern. Older long-term unemployed jobseekers, particularly those with extended welfare histories, are more likely to have developed the response.

Inauthentic Action prevalence increases with duration of unemployment. The pattern is not present in newly unemployed adults at typical rates and rises over the first 6 to 12 months of unemployment, plateauing thereafter. The acceleration aligns with research from Kroft, Lange and Notowidigdo (2013) demonstrating that interview callback rates collapse around the six-month threshold of unemployment, suggesting that the structural rejection by the labour market past six months interacts with the conditional welfare regime to produce the conditions for Inauthentic Action.

Coppin's empirical work, particularly the n = 20,057 Study IV reported in the 2020 OSF preprint, validated a stage-matched intervention approach that produces an average 41.9% uplift in job placement across stages compared with non-matched standard services.

For Inauthentic Action specifically, the recommended intervention design draws on the same underlying disengagement that produces the pattern. Rather than reinforcing the visible action behaviours with more action-stage support (which produces no incremental benefit and risks alienation), interventions should target the latent disengagement directly:

• Motivational interviewing techniques drawn from clinical addiction work, addressing the underlying ambivalence about employment
• Confidence-building interventionsdrawn from Bandura's self-efficacy work, addressing the latent belief that one cannot succeed in or sustain employment
• Well-being interventionsdrawn from Coppin's WAPP (Welfare Applied Positive Psychology) programme and the resilience-building work that informed Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, addressing the broader psychological context that allowed Inauthentic Action to develop
• Decoupling visible compliance from intervention design, so that the participant is not simultaneously being asked to demonstrate action while being supported through the underlying disengagement
• Reducing communication sludge, drawing on the Friction-to-Flow Method validated with BUSY at Work, since participants in Inauthentic Action are particularly vulnerable to cognitive overload that reinforces disengagement

The combined approach has produced documented retention improvements including a 31% reduction in first-month apprentice dropouts (BUSY at Work Friction-to-Flow case study), a 35% increase in apprentice phone-call engagement (BUSY at Work SMudging case study), and the 41.9% job placement uplift reported across 20,057 Australian jobseekers in Coppin's Study IV.

ethyx applies a 12-item, 3.5-minute structured survey based on the URICA-VC adapted by Coppin for general employment populations and refined through over 24,000 Australian field validation cases. The survey is administered before hire (or at any point during employment when retention prediction is required) and produces a stage classification placing each respondent into one of five stages: Precontemplation, Contemplation, Preparation, Action, or Inauthentic Action.

Detection of Inauthentic Action specifically relies on response-pattern analysis. Four diagnostic features distinguish Inauthentic Action from genuine Action:

1. Inconsistency across forward-coded and reverse-coded items. Genuine Action-stage respondents answer all items consistent with the action direction. Inauthentic Action respondents answer visible action items in the action direction and latent or reverse-coded items in directions that surface the underlying disengagement.
2. Rehearsed answer patterns. Action-stage respondents typically vary their responses across items based on the specific question content. Inauthentic Action respondents often produce standardised or rehearsed-looking patterns (consistent strong agreement across all surface items) that are statistically distinguishable from naturally varied responses.
3. Latency and response timing. Where platforms record response latency, Inauthentic Action respondents often show distinctive timing patterns, particularly fast responses on socially-desirable items and longer hesitations on items that surface latent disengagement.
4. Inconsistency across related signal sources. Where multiple signals are available (survey responses, application materials, references, prior employment history), Inauthentic Action respondents tend to show inconsistencies that single-signal surveys miss.

The combined response-pattern analysis is what allows the methodology to predict outcomes that overall positive scoring cannot.

Dr Darren Coppin is the Chief Behavioural Scientist at ethyx and Azurum, and the originator of the Inauthentic Action stage classification. His PhD by Publication, “A Psychosocial Stage of Change Approach to Unemployment”, was awarded by the Australian Catholic University in 2018, supervised by Professor Joseph Ciarrochi (ACU), Professor Baljinder Sahdra (ACU), and Professor Felicia Huppert (University of Cambridge). His applied work has now reached over 250,000 unemployed people across six countries, with the stage-of-change methodology including Inauthentic Action detection underpinning ethyx's commercial pre-hire retention prediction platform. Read more about Dr Coppin →