Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us About Spreading Social Change
Nick Cooney
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 159056233X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Should anti-war protesters use graphic images to get public support for their cause, or will such images turn the public off? In encouraging the public to adopt sustainable behaviors, should environmental organizations ask for small changes like using fluorescent light bulbs or big changes like giving up cars? Why do most Americans say they oppose the cruel practices of factory farms and sweatshops yet still buy products from these places? And how can non-profits get more people to say yes to their requests to volunteer, donate, recycle, write a letter to a political prisoner, support gay rights, go vegetarian, conserve energy or make other positive changes?
Scientific research has generated a wealth of information on how people can be persuaded to alter their behaviors, yet this body of knowledge has been largely ignored by those working to improve society. Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us About Spreading Social Change brings this information to light so that non-profits, community organizers and others can make science-driven decisions in their advocacy work. The book examines more than eighty years of empirical research in areas including social psychology, communication studies, diffusion studies, network systems and social marketing, distilling the highlights into easy-to-use advice and serving as a psychology primer for anyone wanting to spread progressive social change.
just mean agreeing that fair prices should be paid to foreign farm-workers; it also means finding new places to buy coffee, which takes extra work. Status quo bias is also powerful because, as the number of alternatives to choose among increases, inertia grows as well (Kempf and Ruenzi 2006; Samuelson and Zeckhauser 1988). The more options that are presented to us—in company retirement accounts, in choices of entertainment, etc.—the more likely we are not to choose anything, or to stick with
and turns on the light, when the person is leaving they may not look at the light switch and so may not see the prompt. Because of the poor choice of location, prompts like these are less effective than they would be if placed in a more visible spot, such as on the door. When creating prompts, we should use ones that work in concert with people’s current frames of reference. For example, when most people see a trash can, they think “This is where I throw my trash.” When companies, schools,
two different booklets on the subject, with the high-fear version containing graphic pictures of tetanus victims and extremely descriptive language evoking the horrors of tetanus. The low-fear booklet contained similar information but lacked pictures and descriptive language. The students who received the high-fear booklets were more convinced of the dangers of tetanus and the importance of getting shots. However, when Leventhal tracked actual behavior, he found that both booklets produced the
campaigned about, and who stick with those methods and issues for countless years regardless of their level of success. Such decisions may be due in part to limited experience, and in part to the human tendency to fall into comfortable routines. But cognitive dissonance plays a role as well. Faced with evidence that we aren’t being as effective as possible, or that we could do more good by working on another issue or using another tactic, we inevitably find justifications for why we should
every innovation is different, there’s no easy answer as to why some succeed and others fail. But looking at the steps successful innovations take on their way to becoming accepted might provide some insight into how we can be more successful in spreading our own ideas. As we discussed earlier, most people don’t decide which behaviors to choose or which attitudes to hold based on careful analysis. Instead, they look to their peers to hear their judgments and see what they’re doing. However,