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#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!
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.
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!
Gauging public attitudes to the BBC’s “Perfect Storm 2030: Public attitudes”
Mark Easton wrote a good summary yesterday of the government’s work in trying to encourage people to adopt more “pro-environmental” behaviour. He references Defra’s work, which takes a social marketing approach, segmenting the UK population by their attitude towards the environment and choosing specific behaviours (like “install insulation” or “adopt lower impact diet”) that will suit them.
I’m glad he wrote his post, as I think Defra’s approach is novel. But what I’m particularly interested in is how people respond to knowing that central government are approaching behaviour change in this way; which might seem more redolent of an advertising company than a government department.
I’d love someone to release content analysis service for blog comments, but without having that at my disposal, I read the 31 comments that were posted by 9:31 this morning and divided them into the following groups:
- Issues about whether man-made climate change is real and the science certain
- Issues about the relationship between the state and individual
- Issues about individual human behaviour; our incentives and agency
The first section is not really of much interest, and simply reworks old ground.
The third section maps to about 10% of all comments which suggested, among other things, that adopting more pro-environmental behaviur was just not in human nature.
The middle section was the largest; at least a third of the comments fell into it. Comments argued that the government should set an example (Heathrow’s 3rd runway, the Department for Energy & Climate Changes’ apallingly energy-inefficient building etc.) before telling people what to do, and should treat people intelligently when it did so. Various comments also highlighted people’s willingness to change but poor existing infrastructure or policies that trapped them into environmentally damaging ways of life. This section was also the most strongly worded, with comments suggesting that the approach from government was Orwellian and could feed conspiracy theories about climate change.
What is the right way of developing effective behaviour change interventions and policies? Writing from a design perspective I immediately think of public service innovation companies like thinkpublic or Participle. Could a co-design approach to behaviour change interventions help improve the fractured relationship between the individual and the state?
Charm Offensive
Just a quick post to note that Kingston University, the University of the West of England and Swansea University are collaborating on a three year project (CHARM) to explore the effect on people’s behaviour of giving them feedback (what B J Fogg calls “self-monitoring” in Persuasive Technology). Mixing sociology, social psychology and behavioural economics, the project will run three case studies that show the effect of feedback on people’s electricity consumption, their health, and something rather more nebulously based around Facebook.
More details on CHARM here.
It will be great to have some more rigorous academic research in this area.
The project at the RSA that this blog accompanies, by the way, is intending to look at the way in which we can apply Persuasive Technology (including feedback/self-monitoring) to encourage behaviours related to the environment, health, and (again more nebulously) civic participation.
- update -
Details of the EPSRC grant behind CHARM are here with a bit more info.
Designing Heroes
A couple of months ago I wrote a post about a fascinating IPPR report on the language used to communicate climate change. The authors reckoned that a new discourse which they called “ordinary heroism” would be more effective at communicating climate change and encouraging people to take action.
If I remember rightly, this discourse would have shades of Dove’s campaign for real beauty together with an emphasis on communicating that the ordinary (but heroical) actions of people really could aggregate to make a significant difference to big problems (like climate change).
I’ve recently been introduced to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he writes about the idea of the monomyth. The monomyth is a common pattern that ordinary people follow on the road to heroism that is found in mythology from different cultures. Campbell says that Christ’s, Buddha’s and Moses’ journeys, for example, all follow the monomyth:
- The Departure (which includes The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, The Crossing of the First Threshold, Belly of The Whale)
- Initiation (which includes The Road of Trials, Mother as Goddess, Woman as Temptress, Atonement with the Father, Apotheosis, The Ultimate Boon)
- Return (which includes Refusal of the Return, The Magic Flight, Rescue from Without, The Crossing of the Return, Threshold, Master of Two Worlds, Freedom to Live)
[more detail here]
So an ordinary guy receives a call into an unknown world, and once there faces all sorts of trials. On returning to his home world, he’s able to use the experiences and gifts he earned to do good in his world.
Often my beef with (some) talk around behaviour change policy is that it treats people as mechanical entities, that will respond in the right way if we design the right intervention. Behavioural economics, for example, tends to rely on fallibilities in human cognition to bring about behaviour change “under the radar”. An approach that treats people with more respect is a more engaging one – closer, in fact, to education.
Can we use Joseph Campbell’s monomyth to help us create better processes of behaviour-change that lead to “ordinary heroes” (or citizens of the future, as the RSA would put it)?
Nudge & Think
Matthew Taylor published a post on his blog on Friday, which was inspired by this paper [pdf] (definitely worth a read) from the Civic Behaviour project that Manchester and Southampton Universities are collaborating on.
The paper compares two behaviour change strategies of use in public policy; Nudge (ie. behavioural economics), and a more deliberative approach “think” and first takes the view that “The two strategies do not seem to be to be compatible – at first at least”, but concludes “No government should want to get rid of either tool”.
I think the concluding view is right – both techniques are complementary. Nudging can be useful when the harmful behaviour that we’re addressing is habitual (say throwing all your waste into the bin that goes to land-fill), but more deliberative approaches are probably necessary to reduce other harmful behaviours (say physical assaults, to give an extreme example).
One of the difficulties I have with nudging is that it never seems to address the root of a problem. You may be able to make use of clever psychology to direct someone’s behaviour, but that hardly seems to respect people. In other words, nudging may infantilise, which isn’t going to develop the sort of citizens of the future that the RSA is keen to see.
My colleague Matt Grist has also written a post on this subject (I’m just jumping on the bandwagon with this one) and makes a good point about what he calls the naivety of the “think” approach. Matt’s view is that expecting people to think too much is unrealistic – we don’t involve our cognitive processes in some behaviour for good reason – we’d become quickly overloaded. I guess that while this is true, it’s not an argument to write off deliberation, it’s an argument to pick the issues on which we want to encourage deliberation. I dont think it’s terribly important if people don’t recycle, but I do think it’s important that people don’t waste energy.
The difference between the approaches Nudge and “think” also makes me think of this post from Dan Lockton on different approaches to design for behaviour change. Perhaps design that motivates behaviour is closer to Nudge, and design that enables behaviours (e.g. by providing certain information) is closer to “think”?
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