Teens who believe in abstinence until marriage are more likely to become unwed mothers than other teens, notes Clark Williams-Derry over at the Sightline Blog. He draws an interesting lesson from that on an issue closer to home:
Convincing people that you’re right about an issue–say, the scientific consensus about the threat posed by global warming–can seem vitally important, but in the end may be somewhat beside the point. People may well agree with you, but still not act in accordance with those beliefs.
Williams-Derry is right on. The weak connection between agreement and action is a frequent topic of this blog. And of course, an abundance of social research finds the Americans frequently agree – and infrequently act — on the nature protection and pollution control issues that occupy your mind all day.
If agreement alone lead to action, conservation groups would be turning members away, rain barrels would be as common as driveways, and politicians would quake in fear whenever you called. And for that matter, nobody would smoke, litter, neglect their children and pets, or cheat on their taxes, either.
So why do we work so hard in our communications to get people to agree with us even more? Williams-Derry counters:
In the long run, you have to move the debate beyond beliefs, and into incentives: lining up the economic and social incentives such that the right choices are the easy, natural ones To do that, we need smart and effective policies.
It’s the word social that caught my eye, which I why I emphasized it. I write a lot about choosing words and pictures to send social messages to people, but I’m intrigued by the concept of a social incentive. So Mr. Derry-Williams and all you readers out there… what is a “social incentive” and how do we offer them?
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Incentives are great, kinda like coupons for people to try out a new behavior. Paired with removing the barriers to that behavior. Make it easy.
In our watershed program we offered incentives for installation of management practices that controlled farm runoff. The complaint we heard often was that farmers who had already put management practices in use didn’t recieve the incentives. “Bad” farmers, however, were rewarded for not putting the practices in earlier. We never made an attempt to promote the common good and say something like “we all benefit when the stream is clean” which is unfortunate. The program has been discontinued which is unfortunate because it was a model for other states and was effective.
Eric, I only mention this since you do often emphasize the choice of images to accompany meaningful choices of words: I think the lead photo of the pregnant belly would be more effective, if the woman wasn’t wearing what appears to be a wedding ring.
Otherwise, you make a valid point. In our recent outreach efforts about stormwater, we specifically chose behaviors that had some socially-reinforceable quality to them (e.g. fertilizer practices, use of a rain barrel, picking up dog waste, marking storm drains) EVEN THOUGH we recognize that these behaviors might not be the most significant in terms of pollution prevention. The appeal of promoting these behaviors lies in the fact that they can be reinforced by one’s neighbors!
I think one of the major incentives we can use is social pressure. By using words like “working together” and “nature protection” we make it clear that people’s friends and neighbors are engaging in sustainable behaviors and that it is a social norm to build rain barrels, clean up along streams and use green cleaning techniques. Research clearly indicates that if people think their peers are engaging in a behavior they are far more likely to engage in that behavior.
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