#debill #ukelection #ge2010 : Comparative Trends in the Twittersphere
#debill in red, #ukelection in blue, #ge2010 in yellow
Ok, so more to do with technology than design or behaviour, but just a little postto say that yesterday I kept a Twitterfall page open that displayed the tweets tagged with the #debill tag (referring to the UK’s Digital Economy Bill) as it passed the third reading in the House of Commons. Almost without exception, the mood of the twittersphere was frustrated with politicians; partly for the low numbers of MPs present the previous night for the second reading, and partly because MPs seemingly failed to “get” the internet, such as this tweet from Ben Hammersley. At one point another person’s tweet suggested that the number of tweets about the Digital Economy Bill dwarfed that of the UK election, indicating the twittersphere (that presumably many politicians will be relying on in the coming weeks after President Obama’s demonstration of the power of “social media” in elections) was much more concerned about the bill than the election. So I thought I’d do a quick graph, and as the above result shows, they were right!
Get Your Green Goggles On
Earth Hour 2009 - Brisbane - IR Thermal, by Flickr user garry61
Microsoft’s search engine Bing is being advertised on telly at the moment with a series of funny stories that show people overwhelmed or turned into automatons by the massive amount of knowledge that is available to us through the web. The adverts ask “what has search overload has done to us?”.
Too much information can be debilitating, so people and things that can help us make the right decisions from data (Microsoft brand Bing a “decision engine”, not a “search engine”) will play an important part in the future. For example, President Obama recently appointed graphs and stats guru Edward Tufte to join his Recovery Independent Advisory Panel (which is already making interesting advances into the “post bureaucratic age” (as David Cameron calls it) with its innovative website Recovery.org.
Websites designed for big screens that stay in more or less the same place are great of course, but mobile devices are likely to replace the desktop (and even the laptop) computer as the dominant way that people access information from the internet. This potential is being teased out through applications that use so-called augmented reality to layer data from the internet on top of what we see during our everyday lives. This is illustrated nicely by the Worksnug app, which uses a smartphone’s GPS, electronic compass and camera to display a synthesis of the visual real world and the data-world on a phone’s screen (and also of course by Google’s Goggles).
There are a growing number of augmented reality apps out there, but I’m excited by some of the suggestions that Dennis Pamlin made in a paper that the RSA commissioned as part of its Technology in a Cold Climate project. Dennis suggested that a 21st century digital connectivity infrastructure, combined with the internet of things could pave the way to powerful use of augmented reality to allow people to make more sustainable consumer choices.
Mobile phones also have enormous potential to prompt us to adopt better behaviours (something that both Green Thing and Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab know). It seems odd therefore that there aren’t more services such as that picked up in last week’s Guardian; Barcoo, which:
…developed by a group of young Germans, allows customers to point their phones at the barcode on products in shops and find out information such as how environmentally friendly a company is and even how it treats its staff.
An engaging “augmented reality” application that uses the sort of data that Barcoo makes available to help people to make consumer decisions at the point of purchase could be exciting. Does anyone happen to know of any such apps or services? Do you think you would use it if there was one?
Is Superfreakonomics your Bible?
A couple of weeks ago I overheard someone say to a friend “I used to believe in [climate change], but now I don’t. Not since reading Superfreakonomics. It’s my bible. Is that worrying?”, to which I silently screamed “yes”.
A lot of people are saying that we’re “losing” the battle of hearts and minds on climate change. Frustratingly silly mistakes from the IPCC that make a mockery of their reportedly rigorous process, the Climategate fracas from the University of East Anglia, the naff result that was Copenhagen and the failure of the government to find a compelling and aspirational story to explain climate change are all factors that spring to my mind. Coupled of course with the effect of the cold weather as a couple (that one’s great) of our representatives demonstrated.
This poll for the BBC, for example, shows a rise of 10% in agreement with the statement “Climate change is not happening” between November 2009 and December 2010. People’s views can rapidly change on issues (especially when polled on global warming during a cold snap), but it looks like the BBC’s poll is consistent with longer term views.
As part of their survey into public attitudes towards climate change, Defra poll people on their response to five questions which reflect different positions on the New Ecological Paradigm scale:
- “Climate change is beyond control – it’s too late to do anything about it”
- “If things continue on their current course, we will soon experience a major environmental disaster”
- “We are close to the limit of the number of people the earth can support”
- “The so-called ‘environmental crisis’ facing humanity has been greatly exaggerated”
- “The Earth has very limited room and resources”
Here’s what people said at the beginning and end of a two year period. The text is a bit small, but you can click for a bigger view. The columns are grouped in five pairs – the first of each pair shows people’s response in 2007 and the second in 2009.
Ecological Worldview
The overall message of this research seems to be that people aren’t throwing a belief in climate change completely out of the window. There was a change of only 3% towards disagreeing with the statement “The so-called ‘environmental crisis’ facing humanity has been greatly exaggerated”.
Rather people are gradually moderating their views on climate change, with the biggest changes being a 9% shift away from the defeatist view “Climate change is beyond control – it’s too late to do anything about it” and 6% move away from the statement “If things continue on their current course, we will soon experience a major environmental disaster”.
So what would be the right response to this change towards more moderate attitudes towards climate change? I guess the obvious one is to resist the temptation to commission more apocalyptic campaigns and commercials that will increasingly become laughed at or complained about and fail to find a foothold in people’s views.
However there is a more fundamental point to be made. There’s a rapidly growing amount of theory in the public sector around social marketing (and behavioural economics etc.) – but (speaking from the outside) all this knowledge doesn’t seem to be breaking into the planning of communications. The UK’s government has been good at creative comms in the past (e.g. Lord Woolton’s knack for PR) but we don’t seem to be doing very well with climate change. It’s superfrustrating.
“Behavioral economists who can code will one day rule the world”
As a rapidly relapsing programmer, I like this encouragement (not that I really want to rule the world) from a tweet from Jonathan Schwartz, the outgoing CEO of Sun. His prediction was in reference to Kwedit, an intriguing new service that allows people that don’t have credit cards to buy digital content over the web. Launched just under a fortnight ago, Kwedit are solving the problem of the 20m US teenagers and 30m households who don’t have credit cards and consequently have no way to pay for (virtual) goods online.
Kwedit allows people to buy goods over the web, then either pay at a convenience store, or by securely mailing cash, or via Kwedit’s “social payment network” which lets you designate someone else (lucky them) to pay on your behalf. In the world of digital music, smart phone apps and online TV episodes – Kwedit sounds like it fills a gap.
What’s really interesting though is that there’s a strong emphasis in their products on the financial literacy implications for teens:
Kwedit Promise provides a safe, virtual environment in which consumers can learn about credit and develop financial literacy – with no real-world implications. [link]
Users are given a Kwedit score according to how frequently they pay on time and the service functions as a place in which teens can simulate financial credit – in the same way that the BSM use driving simulators to give you basic training before heading out into the dangerous real world. It’s the sort of thing you wish the big banks had thought of five years ago.
Kwedit Score
But what does this have to do with behavioural economics? For one thing, the cognitive bias of delayed gratification bias (self control) is well known, and strikingly researched in children by Walter Mischel in his marshmallow experiment. Mischel investigated the self control of children by presenting them with a marshmallow and giving them the choice to eat their marshmallow, or wait for 20 minutes and receive a second marshmallow. Follow-up research indicated that the children able to stave off temptation tended to receive higher ratings for being dependable and higher SAT scores later in life.
I’m still mulling this over, but I’d love to hear what effect Kwedit might have teenagers’ self control a few years down the line – let me know what you think!
Crowdsourcing Comments
I’m putting together some ideas for a short pamphlet on behaviour change policy and designers (mostly service and product designers I suppose). Here’s a precis:
Civil servants, politicians and their advisors have been fascinated to hear how knowledge from psychology can give insights that may lead to more effective ways to encourage people to change their behaviour. How to use such knowledge to generate policy options is a different question, and developing behaviour change interventions could be risky. These risks may be mitigated by adopting working practices more usually found in the creative industries than Whitehall and Westminster.
What I’m trying to say is that politicians, political advisors and civil servants interested in the effect of social proof and other nudges lack a process that allows them to move from this theoretical knowledge to putting such insights into practice in a way that is fun, transparent and effective.
From my perspective, I think that design could contribute a lot to this discourse – especially designers’ ability to come up with creative ideas, their reliance on social research and their experience in co-design and social prototyping.
I’d love to know what you think – do drop me a comment.
Decode at the V&A
I visited the V&A’s Decode exhibition over the weekend which showcases digital interactive art. Decode did a good job of showing how code was becoming a tool in its own right for artists and designers, how technology allowed people to interact more fully (read: full of very excited children) with exhibits, and how dynamic visualisations could be generated from vast networks. The video for Radiohead’s House of Cards was displayed on an interactive screen but others I hadn’t seen before, like Troika’s digital zoetrope which whizzed round displaying an incoherent babble of words, then suddenly clicked into focus showing snippets of a story: “stockbroker / 200k / belgravia / she left me” before changing speed again so that the words fell back into the babble. Putting the puritan hat of Edward Tufte on, I guess I’d say that a lot of the visualisations didn’t always have bringing clarity to data as their first concern: when walking around lots of things made me think “that looks complicated”, rather than “that helps me understand”.
In his 2003 book Persuasive Technology, BJ Fogg lists some reasons why using technology to influence behaviour is different from persuading people using other forms of media like traditional advertising. For example the anonymity of interacting with a machine can encourage people to be more open in their responses to questions which could allow a computer to present more tailored responses. Computers can also sift through enormous volumes of data to present people with an overpowering case - or find the one fact in millions that they find most persuasive. Another reason Fogg gives that I find convincing is that computers can present people with a rich variety of text, video, audio and the ability to interact and simulate, allowing people to select the media that they find most engaging.
Decode wasn’t an exhibition about changing behaviour of course, but it was interesting to read an interview with one of the artists, Golan Levin, who when asked “what do digital technologies allow you to do or investigate that other tools do not?” replied “I can create ‘behaviour’”.
Missing Links
My Wii age is the same as my real age. This means that the makers of Wii Sports consider that, based on my age, height and sense of balance - I am fit. Nice to be given the approval from a games console. If on the other hand it calculates that you are overweight or obese it rather nastily swells the tummy of your mii (your avatar in the game) in proportion. It’s a cheeky response from a lump of electronics and plastic.
It’s difficult not to get uppity when people imply (at least when you haven’t asked them) that you should correct the way you live. We tend to think our lifestyles only have an effect on ourselves and our close family and friends. In many ways it’s just not true though. Stats last year showed that NHS trusts saw spending rise seven-fold in three years on obesity-related costs; a trend that will come under scrutiny when public sector spending as a whole faces cuts.
There’s been an explosion of research in public policy over the last few years into more effective ways to encourage “behaviour change” – renewed interest in social marketing, behavioural economics, neuroscience, social and cognitive psychology… Through a heavy pile of papers and reports, we seem to know more than ever about what affects the decisions we make. In theory allowing us to design intelligent policies and measures that give us freedom while protecting others from the fall-out of our actions.
One of my frustration is that we need to put more of this research into action – behaviour-change theory is fascinating, but it’s only half the challenge. We need good ideas for how we can convert knowledge into practice.
One way in which the RSA is trying to jump this theory/practice gap is through a short project with the police. Working with the National Police Improvement Agency, we carried out some short qualitative research with officers and the public to identify a few key behaviours. We chose behaviours we thought likely to affect levels of public confidence in the police – the police force’s main target – and chose an approach of using design and technology (everything from handcuffs to websites) to form behaviour change interventions.
Working with a few designers, we used the Design with Intent toolkit to brainstorm new ideas which could encourage more desirable behaviours. These ranged from using heart rate monitors to help officers monitor their levels of stress, to using Waitrose-like plastic tokens to allow people to vote for the police force’s neighbourhood priorities. We’ll publish a more comprehensive list in a few weeks here.
We ran through the same process a couple of weeks later with a larger group of people more familiar with the police. One of the strengths of the DwI toolkit seemed to me to give those who aren’t professional designers the confidence to come up with new ideas. By looking at how others have used design to influence behaviour it is easier to transpose those ideas to the behaviours that you are trying to change.
It’s methods like DwI that are one of the components missing from much of the behaviour change discourse. We need that idea-generating process to help policy makers work with designers, behaviour experts and people to make the leap into practice. Maybe then we’d find some better ways of reducing obesity and its rapidly rising social costs.
From Data to Behaviour
Matthew Taylor’s thesis that a more engaged citizen (as opposed to a consumer) is required to reform government, one that will understand the need to make trade-offs and one that takes personal responsibility for their actions, is perfectly exemplified by many of today’s activist geeks. Individuals like Tom Steinberg and MySociety, a voluntary organisation of technical experts donate their time to the challenge of scraping data from public sector websites (like Hansard records) and re-published it in websites that are far more engaging, allowing others in turn to become more engaged.
Today, principally because of their example, and reports like the Power of Information review, both the present government and the opposition fully recognise the value of making such data available online, where communities of people linked by the internet can ‘get excited and make things‘. This appears to be causing the enormous pent-up enthusiasm to be released; indicated by the membership of the new http://data.gov.uk/ site’s discussion group reaching 1,464 (at time of writing) with some extremely active discussions.
Stephen Timms recently spoke at the RSA, highlighting the success of the government’s effort to open up more data, and the efforts made are likely to remain, with the Conservative party also showing enthusiasm for the idea. When it comes to opening up government data, the most ambitious example I’ve seen so far is http://www.recovery.gov/, the website for the US Government’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – Obama’s stimulus package.
I often write about ”persuasive technology” on this blog, which has, as a pretty foundational tenet, that allowing people to see the effect of their actions, or “self-monitoring” can enable and encourage them to change their behaviour (a la real-time energy displays). Freeing public sector data is simply this on a much more ambitious scale.
AGM!
Tomorrow (Wednesday 6th) is a special day at the RSA as it marks the 255th Annual General Meeting of the Society. To celebrate, we are hosting a day of seminars for the Fellows of the RSA about the project team’s work, followed by the AGM itself and the Chairman’s speech in the evening.
The project team’s seminars include:
Connected Communities
10.30am – 12.00pm
Steve Broome and William Shaw will discuss their programme of action research projects that work together to understand how social networks operate and can be better used in creating the kind of sustainable communities we want to live in.
Peterborough Project
1.30pm – 2.20pm
Sam McLean will be on hand to talk about The Peterborough Project; an exciting, long-term partnership between the RSA, Peterborough City Council, Opportunity Peterborough and Arts Council East with the core aim of reshaping the identity of Peterborough around active, sustainable citizenship.
Design and Education
2.30pm – 3.20pm
Emily Campbell from our Design & Society project and Louise Thomas from our Education project will explore the ways in which design principles might be applied in education to support rigorous innovation, as well as increase the agency, independence and capacity of educational practitioners.
Social Brain
3.30pm – 4.20 pm
Matt Grist will discuss new ways of thinking about brains and behaviour that offer insight into how to create a more self-reliant and ‘pro-social’ society; in line with the RSA’s vision of social progress.
If you’re able to visit the RSA tomorrow you will also see a fantastic exhibition that details the society’s varied and surprising history – from chimney brushes to the RSA academy with everything else between. Not simply a retrospective, the exhibition will develop over time as more people, projects and ideas are added. You can see a virtual version on the RSA’s website, but I’d recommend popping in if you can.
Other ways that Fellows who aren’t able to get to John Adam Street can listen and talk on the day include watching the speech online from 6:30, or by tweeting your thoughts to #rsaagm.
Looking forward to it!
Potato Propaganda
“There is nothing new under the sun”, said a depressed Solomon. That’s certainly true of government using psychology to influence their people, notwithstanding the excitement among policy makers around behavioural economics. An example is the good story about Frederick the Great’s attempts to introduce the potato into Prussia in the 18th century, or the shift in public health during the 50s and 60s from “a culture of secrecy to a culture of communication”.
The other example that not too many people mention is propaganda. I’m not yet quite sure where government interest in behaviour change policy stops and propaganda begins. This is a question that arises in an article by Conrad Bird for the Foreign Office, when applying lessons from domestic policy to public diplomacy. He says:
Strategic communication has a key role to play in securing behaviour change. Although the examples used above are from the UK domestic policy context, the principles that underlie strategic communication can be applied universally. Where there are people, there is insight to be generated – all the more so if we are working with peoples of differing cultures, ethnicities and religions. And we will always need to work out how to segment our audiences so that we can craft and tailor compelling propositions.
One review of Bird’s article picks up on the theme that the public diplomacy that Bird speaks of is really propaganda (apparently an old argument to diplomatic types) under a new name and is skeptical about how appropriate a strategy it is:
“If all this [behaviour change / strategic communication] is public diplomacy or is, at least, on the minds of some of those practicing it, then I would not like to be one of their targets”
The FCO response to the review is worth a look – and among the points it makes is that one distinction between behaviour change (or public diplomacy in this case) and propaganda is that the latter is one way and doesn’t seek a dialogue with its target. But I’m not yet convinced that this distinction is upper-most in the minds of policy makers keen to experiment with the new knowledge of behavioural economics.
Where do you think “behaviour change” stops and propaganda begins?
On a related note, one piece of public health advice that looks uncannily like propaganda tried to put a face on AIDS – and ended up using an image of a mass-murderer. The campaign has attracted a lot of criticism, and the linked image is quite strong [link].
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