Change is hard. We’re asking people to invest effort and negotiate risk. We know they’re liable to resist any form of pressure.

So what might work? Here are 8 rules and some tips.

You’ll immediately notice that change communication is likely to be more fun and interesting than inform communication!

Here is a 2 page practice sheet “Communication for Change”.

Hope you find it useful.

Warm wishes

– Les

PLUS Details of upcoming CHANGEOLOGY workshops in Sydney and Melbourne are now available.

It’s an enjoyable two days with a wonderful bunch of colleagues. Bring along a tricky environmental, social or health challenge. Leave with a prototype project ready for its first public outing.

Download the brochure here.

Booking and full details.

Discounts for climate change projects: We’re offering 2 for 1 discounts for teams working on climate change projects. Plus full scholarships to a limited number of passionate volunteers working on similar projects. If you’re seeking a volunteer place, please start by sending me a short email explaining your project.

Reasons, benefits and arguments are not just overrated, they are dangerous and counter-productive. Worse, they harm and kill people.

I know that sounds extreme. Bear with me.
Reasons-based change communications are everywhere. You know, the typical Quit advert, or anti-domestic violence advert, or anti-drug message. They’re all based on an implied argument that “You should change because X cost and/or Y benefit”.
The problem with “you should” messages is that they pressure people, and pressure causes resistance. And resistance means that fewer people end up doing healthy, safe behaviours. So more people are harmed than would would be the case without the communication.
Listen to this perplexed researcher in an experiment that examined the effects of health warning labels on fatty products: (1)

“Warning people about the harmful effects of fatty products only made them want to eat the fatty product more…Although people don’t mind being informed about the potentially harmful risks associated with products, they don’t like to receive unwanted advice about how they should behave.”(1)

This is called the Boomerang Effect. It’s backed by a massive weight of empirical evidence through meta evaluations of many hundreds of behaviour change programs. The basic idea is quite intuitive really: we humans are averse to acting on advice intended to change our behaviour, especially when we are the ones who most need the advice. Why? Because that advice implies that we have made wrong decisions. Inadvertently, the advice belittles us. The psychologist Elliot Aronson wrote that most people have favourable views of themselves: they want to see themselves as competent, moral, and able to predict their own behaviour (2). When they receive information that inadvertently contradicts those self-perceptions, they tend to deny and resist it.
So what might be a better approach?
Don’t try to argue people into change, instead show them HOW to start their journey.

People don’t need to be told why they should change. They need to be shown how to start

Mostly, anyone who’s going to change as a result of our efforts already knows the reasons why they should change. In fact, large numbers of people are already highly motivated to improve their lives and make a difference in their worlds.
For example 70% of smokers already want to quit; 90% of overweight young women want to lose weight; 70% of Australians think climate change is a pressing problem etc. What they lack is self-efficacy: the belief that they can successfully carry out effective actions, and get a result, without the risk of failure or embarrassment.
Helping people over the hurdle of just starting is a more powerful change intervention that lecturing them about costs and benefits.
How can we create that self-efficacy? Well, having relationships with peer role models is undoubtedly the best way, but self-efficacy is something that communication can contribute to.
The trick is to depict the necessary actions so clearly that a typical listener could say:
“I could do that!”
This is a critical point. It’s not enough simply to demonstrate a behaviour. What’s vital is that we genuinely create an “I could do that” moment for our audience. This immediately tells us that the action we depict has to be simple and within their capacities.
Here are some nice examples of self-efficacy building communications.
This is my favourite, from The Food Safety Information Council. Notice how unnecessary the slogan is at the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvyRSQrfpJg
Shellharbour City Council gets it with this advert for their food waste collection service.

https://vimeo.com/196789244
The Quit campaign just made its first positive anti-smoking advert (well done!). It creates self-efficacy by letting viewers rehearse effective self-talk. (Though notice how the makers couldn’t help lecturing in the last few sentences).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQpcK5gL5W8
The beautiful thing about self-efficacy is that people willingly embrace new skills and abilities. We humans love to increase our power and agency in the world. Communications that increase self-efficacy therefore tend not to create resistance.
So next time we’re inclined to reason with our audiences, let’s think about creating an “I could do that!” moment instead. We’ll reduce the chance of resistance and create an opportunity for all to be part of the solution.
P.S. There’s another reason why ‘I could do that’ communications are a good idea.

Numbers

Let’s say our communication reaches 30% of the target population, and succeeds in getting an amazing 5% of those viewers to click to the next stage, or download the app, or call a 1300 number, or whatever. That sounds good, but wait a minute! We activated only 1.5% of the target population. We actually reached another 28.5% of target population but failed to give them any meaningful role in the solution. We didn’t involve them at all! That’s a terribly wasted opportunity. By building wide self-efficacy with our communication we greatly magnify our impact by giving everyone a do-able role.
References:
(1) Bushman, B. J. (1998) ‘Effects of warning and information labels on consumption of full-fat, reduced-fat, and no-fat products’, Journal of Applied Psychology 83, 97-101.
(2) Aronson, E. (1999) ‘Dissonance, hypocrisy and self-concept’, in E. Harmon-Jones and J. Mills (eds.), Cognitive Dissonance: Progress on a pivotal theory in social psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 103-26.
 

“I just didn’t have the energy to fight them. I went into shock. It made me feel like a piece of shit.”

“When it was pushed on me, I was really angry because they didn’t look at the big picture. They didn’t look at who I am.” (1)

There are bullies in every school yard. There are bullies amongst states – especially well-armed ones. States so frequently bully and intimidate their own citizens that it should probably be a useful addition to Weber’s definition of a state “The monopoly on the use of force and the default use of threats to control their subjects’ behaviour.” Just now we have an outbreak of politicians and academics advocating the use of threats to close down overseas surrogacy – a tactic which, I would have thought, had already failed.
Human beings respond viscerally to being bullied. It causes an instant, powerful immune response. It makes us resist. Some of us push back immediately, some bide their time, but every bullied person is profoundly motivated to restore their lost dignity.
Our capacity for resistance is one of the glories of human nature – the ability to push back against the bully to recover our threatened identity, optimism and hope. It explains human progress: how, generation after generation, the human race stumbles forward and slowly betters itself. It also explains every civil war and every liberation struggle.
Inexplicably, the science of psychology has almost completely avoided studying either resistance or dignity. However there’s still enough experimental and observational evidence to answer a few important FAQs.
Does bullying work?
Can bullying, as the bullies intend, achieve the goal of humbling and controlling the intended victims?
In the short term most intended victims will probably pull their heads in, feign compliance, or run away. But not for long, because the bullied have very strong motivations to push back.
To understand why the bullied don’t just hunker down and comply, it’s important to appreciate that dignity is indispensible for the basic functions of life. Without it we become anxious, listless, and depressed or angry. Our immune system works less well. The well-known psychologist Martin Seligman carried out seminal research on learned helplessness in the 1970s. His experiments with dogs found that, when unable to avoid unescapable shocks, most simply gave up trying to avoid them. (Significantly, though, around 30% of animal subjects simply could not be cowed.)
It appears that dignity, hope, identity and health are all wrapped together and indispensible for a healthy life. That makes humans into highly motivated, sustained resisters against those who would reduce their dignity.
The result is a fatal asymmetry between bullies and victims – one that’s ultimately fatal for the bullies. The asymmetry concerns endurance.
Because dignity can never afford to give up, resistance lasts for as long as it takes for dignity to be restored. It is amazingly tireless, patient and enduring. The Vietnamese struggle against colonialism took 30 years. The anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa took over 40 years.
Bullying also brings out the magnificence of human ingenuity. Because the self is threatened, victims often think about practically nothing else except ways to undermine, circumvent, or punish their bullies. Because they’re on the job full time, they tend to be smarter than the bullies who are so often scrambling to keep up.
In the case of BasicsCard, for example, there’s evidence that gamblers resisted by changing the currency of gambling from cash to food, clothing, and the BasicsCard itself (2). (We may think that gambling is a unhealthy pastime, but that’s not the point. Humans are motivated to resist all threats to their liberties, whether the liberty is healthy or not.)
The tireless, ingenious character of resistance means that it always, always, eventually wins because the policies of states and institutions are less enduring. Their victims do not go away – they are still resisting when the bullies are old and grey, when they’ve lost the election, when their politics has crumbled.
Bullying may provide an immediate rush of power and omnipotence for the bullies. The problem is, it puts them in a co-dependent relationship with their victims. More and more of their time, and treasure, and reputation, and political capital, will go into controlling the bullied. They may end up finding, like many regimes, that it’s just about all they do.
In the end, bullies and bullied can find themselves in a mutually destructive co-dependent relationship, like that between the Gazans and Israelis, or between poor African-American neighbourhoods and city police forces.
Is being bullied good for the victims?
It seems an absurd question, but it’s clearly the theory behind many attempts at social engineering, notably from the conservative side of politics. Back in 2002 federal employment minister Mal Brough was honest enough to admit the government’s policy for the long term unemployed was “embuggerance”, a military term for making someone’s life a misery. Making the life of the unemployed impossible has since emerged as a core strategy behind the employment programs of both sides of politics. Forcing a young person to apply (and then be rejected) for 40 jobs a month, every month, until they find a job, when they are at the most emotionally insecure time of their lives, is surely one of the most diabolical humiliations ever conceived by Australian politics. The Intervention’s removal of what little autonomy was still possessed by indigenous people in the Northern Territory is another.
But is this kind of bullying good for the unemployed, or for indigenous people? Does it get them busy for a positive purpose?
The effect of “fear appeals” in advertising is an analogous phenomenon that’s been well studied by psychologists. [For example: For example: Elliot, B. (2003) The Psychology of Fear Appeals Revisited, http://acrs.org.au/files/arsrpe/RS030056.pdf ] The consensus is, in fact, that fear can be quite motivating. Fear arouses the emotions and focuses attention. The bigger the fear, the higher the motivation. But whether that motivation is directed towards hyperdefensiveness or towards positive action depends entirely on another factor: whether the subjects have the confidence to carry out the desired action. If the desired action is complicated, challenging, unpredictable, or itself threatening, then the prefered response is likely to be avoidance or resistance.
Bullying, too, causes the same motivation to resist, or hyper-resist. But more sharply so, since it is people’s identity that’s threatened. Ultimately it’s a positive thing that the bullied become so highly motivated. The downside is that they can easily end up spending much of their time doing things that are unproductive…like petty burglary to obtain spending money, or futilely shooting rockets across the border into southern Israel. These activities require a lot of motivation, but they don’t really help. If your unchecked hurt and rage embed you into a 24/7 culture of resistance, that’s probably a bad thing. You might find that you’re effectively self-harming: doing the bullies’ job for them.
So, no, being bullied isn’t really good for you.
Are there alternatives to bullying?
This too seems like a ridiculous question, but the stark behaviours we see in the news suggest that many power holders may never have contemplated alternatives.
First, is there an alternative to endemic social conflict, such as we see between Gaza and Israel?
Yes, dear friends, that is what justice was invented for.
Justice means putting into practice the principles of natural justice (the rule against bias, and the right to a fair hearing). And it means establishing institutions that act as neutral umpires in conflict situations. Hence we have independent judiciaries, commissions of inquiry, and ICAC.
Incidentally, institutions that create fairness do more than reduce conflict. They’re also the basis of national prosperity. Acemoglu and Robinson in their book Why Nations Fail argue persuasively that there is just one cause for the prosperity of nations: “institutions, institutions, institutions.” Nations whose institutions are captured by economic elites and converted into vehicles for enriching the few signal to the population that there is little point in investing their own energy in betterment. Those nations lose their prosperity.
Populations that resist self-aggrandising elites, and instead build and care for pro-fairness institutions, are those whose economies prosper. (It’s interesting how many historic dimensions there are to resistance!)
Second, what if you want to persuade people to do things that are good for them and avoid doing things that are damaging?
Forty years of research into human motivation and behaviour tell us that one factor above all others determines people’s choices and actions: self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy means that someone has the confidence that, if they invest their energy, time and reputation, they’ll get results they desire, with a minimum of risk and uncertainty. What matters is not making bad actions hard and unpleasant. It turns out that doesn’t work at all. It’s about making good actions easy, simple and more certain.
So, for young Gazans to act for peace they need a pathway to dignity that’s easier and more certain than building rockets.
And if long term unemployed Australians are to find jobs they need positive help to build their self-efficacy, as well as jobs that are actually available (just what a recent study by Anglicare concluded).
So, dear bullies, these are some things you should know: bullying is bad for you, just as it’s bad for your victims, and you’ll lose in the end. And if, perchance, you want to stop being a bully, you need to develop a commitment to fairness and start building an environment where other people can realise their hopes.
Sources:
(1) Source: Equality Rights Alliance (ERA) (2011) ‘Women’s experience of income management in the Northern Territory’. Canberra: ERA.
(2) Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA), op. cit. (see ref. 38) p.48; and ORIMA Research (2010) ‘Evaluation of the child protection scheme of income management and voluntary income management measures in Western Australia’, p.204.

We expect decision-makers to be open to partnerships and multi-disciplinary processes because they break down silos – the No1 way organisations destroy their capacity to make change – and they are just, well, the modern way to do things. But that discounts the natural fears of decision-makers.

Helping people manage their fears, by preemptively addressing them, is one of the main tasks of a change maker, so having a handle on those fears matters.

Here’s the list of fears, which, of course, involve worries about time, risk, conflict, wasted effort, and having to defend oneself against people who think differently.

http://www.twyfords.com.au/news-and-media/our-blog/meeting-collaborative-danger-headon

Twyfords seem to be making a specialty of collaboration…check their blog: http://www.twyfords.com.au/our-blog/+collaborative%20governance

http://www.grist.org/article/series/skeptics

Proving that even pea brains can be amazingly creative when their self-interest is threatened.

1. There’s nothing happening
   1. Inadequate evidence
      • There is no evidence
      • One record year is not global warming
      • The temperature record is simply unreliable
      • One hundred years is not enough
      • Glaciers have always grown and receded
      • Warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect
      • Mauna Loa is a volcano
      • The scientists aren’t even sure
   2. Contradictory evidence
      • It’s cold today in Wagga Wagga
      • Antarctic ice is growing
      • The satellites show cooling
      • What about mid-century cooling?
      • Global warming stopped in 1998
      • But the glaciers are not melting
      • Antarctic sea ice is inc
        reasing
      • Observations show climate sensitivity is not very high
      • Sea level in the Arctic is falling
      • Some sites show cooling
   3. No consensus
      • Global warming is a hoax
      • There is no consensus
      • Position statements hide debate
      • Consensus is collusion
      • Peiser refuted Oreskes
         
2. We don’t know why it’s happening
   1. Models don’t work
      • We cannot trust unproven computer models
      • The models don’t have clouds
      • If aerosols are blocking the sun, the south should warm faster
      • Observations show climate sensitivity is not very high
   2. Prediction is impossible
      • We can’t even predict the weather next week
      • Chaotic systems are not predictable
   3. We can’t be sure
      • Hansen has been wrong before
      • If we can’t understand the past, how can we understand the present?
      • The scientists aren’t even sure
      • They predicted global cooling in the 1970s
         
3. Climate change is natural
   1. It happened before
      • It was warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum
      • The medieval warm period was just as warm as today
      • Greenland used to be green
      • Global warming is nothing new!
      • The hockey stick is broken
      • Vineland was full of grapes
   2. It’s part of a natural change
      • Current global warming is just part of a natural cycle
      • Mars and Pluto are warming too
      • CO2 in the air comes mostly from volcanoes
      • The null hypothesis says global warming is natural
      • Climate is always changing
      • Natural emissions dwarf human emissions
      • The CO2 rise is natural
      • We are just recovering from the LIA
   3. It’s not caused by CO2
      • Climate scientists dodge the subject of water vapor
      • Water vapor accounts for a
        lmost all of the greenhouse effect
      • There is no proof that CO2 is causing global warming
      • Mars and Pluto are warming too
      • CO2 doesn’t lead, it lags
      • What about mid-century cooling?
      • Geological history does not support CO2’s importance
      • Historically, CO2 never caused temperature change
      • It’s the sun, stupid
         
4. Climate change is not bad
   1. The effects are good
      • What’s wrong with warmer weather?
         
5. Climate change can’t be stopped
   1. Too late
      • Kyoto is a big effort for almost nothing
   2. It’s someone else’s problem
      • Why should the U.S. join Kyoto when China and India haven’t?
      • The U.S. is a net CO2 sink
   3. Economically infeasible
      • Climate change mitigation would lead to disaster

On the weekend I saw a sign at Minnamurra Rainforest walk that said “No swimming or diving. Penalties apply.”

Last month the NSW Parliament made the act of compensating the mother of a surrogate baby punishable by two years imprisonment.

Is criminalisation an effective way to control behaviours that are deemed to cause social or environmental harms?

The oft-quoted success story is Mandatory Seat Belt laws. So I thought I’d go back and look at how these laws achieved such a momentous change in behaviour.

I wasn’t prepared for the story that emerged. In short, seat belt laws, combined with continuous enforcement and education, HAVE modified the behaviour of all but a small percentage of the population. Nowadays, practically everyone belts up. But what seat belt laws HAVE NOT DONE is make us a whole lot safer. Amazingly, after 40 years, repeated analyses by credible statisticians show that we are little safer than before the laws were enacted.

Subtle forms of social resistance appear to have almost completely negated the hoped-for impact of these laws on road safety.

I didn’t think that would happen. Neither did the authorities. The story has important implications for anyone attempting to control behaviour through criminalisation.

Here’s the story, and below it are some lessons.

What lessons can be drawn from the history of seat belt laws?

1) If you can avoid using criminalisation as a tactic, do so. Criminalisation causes resistance and unexpected blow-backs can fundamentally undermine your efforts.

2) Ensure you have a believable, science-based, clearly articulated case, supported by respected, independent voices.

3) Don’t consider criminalisation until you have overwhelming support and a high degree of voluntary compliance in the target population. In effect, criminalisation should only be considered when it reinforces exiting social norms. Criminalisation may therefore be useful at the end of a long process of voluntary change to control the behaviour of a very small number of chronic resistors.

4) There will always be a small number of resistors and they are likely to cause a disproportionate amount of harm. Therefore understand that criminalisation requires a significant, endless investment in monitoring and enforcement. Weakness in this area is likely to fundamentally undermine the impact of legislation.

(Except for one article that argued that habit was “goal-directed automaticity”.)

So I thought about it, and I think that habit might consist of at least 5 different entities. Interesting thing is, when you consider each entity separately you get some ideas about how to overcome what can seem to be ingrained habits.

1) Pay-off. Some habits are maintained because they “work”. So, for instance, someone habitually accepts plastic bags at the supermarket, because that delivers ease and convenience.

Solution: make the practice less convenient, and it’s alternative more convenient.

2) Obliviousness. Some habits are maintained because we aren’t paying attention. For instance, I habitually ignore roadside speeding signs because I just don’t see them (really!) The human brain only has so much attention to spread around, and we might be just habitually paying attention to other things (like our thoughts). [Google “salience”].

Solution: prompt people to pay attention to the matter.

3) Sunk costs (or ‘loss aversion’). We may have invested a lot of money, time or prestige in a particular practice. Because humans naturally overestimate losses compared to potential gains, we often defend our investments to the point of stupidity. [Google “Loss Aversion”]

Solution: encourage people to consider the ‘big picture’ or ‘long view’ where the the long-term gain is worth the short-term loss.

4) Denial or resistance. Where fear of the unfamiliar causes us to avoid information about it, and resist pressure to change our behaviour.
[Google “Cognitive Dissonance” and “Psychological Reactance”]

Solution: increase the familiarity of the new practice.

5) Social identity. Where someone’s social identity is wrapped up in a practice, change can threaten their identity and relationships, so naturally they actively maintain that practice (a case of denial, really).

Solution: connect the new practice to people’s values.
6) Just plain old inertia. Change takes energy, and people naturally prefer a low-energy state, especially for routine tasks.
Solution: break the routine with an out-of-the-ordinary, fun, social event like a Ride to Work Day, or competition, party, sale etc…

Just found this great graph in WHO’s 2004 World Report on Traffic Injury Prevention (yes, I know, get a life).

It shows how high profile law enforcement has made a big difference to buckling up behaviour, for 80% of Fins at least.

Of course that’s still 20% of Fins NOT buckling up..a lot of people.

Incidentally eleven US states now exceed 90% compliance. In New Hampshire, the only US state without mandatory seat belt laws (true to its motto “live free or die”), the rate is 63.5%. In Australia it’s 90% – 97% for those well-behaved Victorians.