Today we're going to talk about cognitive approaches to audience communication. We're going to review this metaphor, the rider and the elephant, that nicely encapsulates the cognitive, affective, and place-based factors that play a role in behavior change. We're going to talk about climate literacy: what the audience thinks they know about climate change, what they want to know, and what they need to know, as well as what they actually know. We're going to look at the current public understanding of the impact of climate change on human health, and then we're going to look at some examples of effective cognitive messaging. So the rider and the elephant is a nice metaphor developed by the psychologist, Jonathan Haidt for how behavior is created. That there is a rider on the elephant, that represents our cognition. The rider knows where he wants to go, the rider understands the issue, and wants to get to some end-point. The elephant provides the motivation to get there. If the elephant doesn't want to go where the rider wants to go, what do you think is going to happen? They're not going to get to the goal. We need to have the motivation in order for any kind of behavior change to occur. Then the path determines how difficult the journey is. This goes back to the place-based factors that we've discussed about in the people and places model, that if their behavior is very difficult to perform, there are a lot of obstacles then in the elephant's path, makes it a lot more difficult for the rider and the elephant to reach their destination. So our tasks as communicators are to direct the rider and motivate the elephant. We can also shape the path to some degree. Many of the obstacles are actually physical, contextual, and that we're only going to achieve through agency collaborations. Like working with the transportation department to create more bike paths, things like that that actually change the shape of communities. But we can also shape the path in terms of messaging that addresses social norms that can be obstacles to change. So where do we want the rider to go, and what are the steps that are going to take him there? The steps necessary to get the rider to our destination have been outlined by a number of scholars. But this is a really great model that goes all the way back to 1981, William McGuire. It's a great model because it's very detailed and breaks down all these minute parts in the step, this hierarchy of affects to persuasion and behavior change. First of all, the person has to be exposed to the message. Second, they have to attend to the message. Just because the message is in front of them doesn't mean that they're paying attention to it, and often advertisers will conflate those and assume that exposure equals attention, it doesn't. Then the speaker liking the message and becoming interested in it, understanding it, learning the skills that it wants to teach us in terms of what we need to do in order to make the behavior change. Then there's actual attitude change, yielding, persuasion. We have to remember it in such a way that we'll be able to retrieve the information later, making a decision to actually act then acting. Then after we perform the behavior once, we need reinforcement. That is, we reinforce ourselves by saying I feel good for having done that or other people reinforce us for having done it by recognizing it as a good thing to have done, that happens a few times and then you get behavioral consolidation in which a habit is formed and we're going to do it continually in the future. The steps from 2-5 are largely cognitive. Those are the kinds of steps we're going to be talking about. Those are the steps we're going to be talking about today. Number 3 and number 6 are attitudinal and they will influence the likelihood of getting to step number 7 of remembering. We have to have interests and attitude change. It isn't enough just to learn the information, you have to want to keep it, be motivated to, be persuaded by in order to store it in memory and retrieve it later. So it's going to influence the likelihood that we will actually get to a behavior change. Now, these factors all shape the audience response at each of these steps, and they can influence the audience response in different ways. For example, let's say that Al Gore is interviewed on the news. So we have our source and we know what his message is going to be about climate change. If I am a member of the dismissive segment of the public, I am likely, if it's on the news and I am exposed to it, I will attend to that message. So the fact that it is him makes me more likely to attend to it. But what I'm going to do when I am exposed to him or when I listen to him is I am going to counter argue, and so yielding and attitude change are less likely to occur because it was him. The fact that it was Al Gore made me more likely to attend, but less likely to be persuaded. We need to take those factors into consideration when we decide who we are going to use as a source, where we're going to have our message appear, what channel, and those factors are determined then largely by what we know about the receivers, who we're trying to reach with what kind of behavior. So the model implies here, this is a knowledge-attitude-behavior model, and it implies that knowledge is a necessary condition for behavior change, but it's not a sufficient condition. The elephant, the motivation is needed as well. But there are There's also the context to consider. This is a model that was developed by Gwgnano, Storn, and Dietz back in 1995 that I think speaks to the path, and its importance in terms of the way that behavior happens. When behavior is very difficult, very few people engage in that behavior. When it's easy, a lot of people will engage in the behavior. So biking 30 miles to work, very few people are doing that. Curbside recycling, many people are doing that because it's so simple. So we want to make the behavior as easy to performance as we can. Now, the role of the elephant, the role of motivation is related to the likelihood of performing the behavior in a curvilinear way, such that for a very difficult behavior, even if I'm highly motivated it may not be possible to do the behavior. Or I would really like to do that but it's just too hard, I can't do it. On the other hand, if the behavior is very easy, I'm likely to do it regardless of whether I care about the behavior or not the curbside recycling. It's here in the mid-range that motivation makes such a difference to the extent that we can make the behavior easy. We don't need to worry about the elephant as much. I want you to think about recycling bins in public places, I think that can be an example of this. When I travel I find that in some locations recycling bins are all over the place, and in other places it's very difficult to find a recycling bin. Even though I care a great deal about the environment, I have been known to throw trash into the trash can when I cannot find a recycling bin anywhere. Now, when it comes to it being easy, there are degrees of easy. So if the recycling bin says on the top to put this type of article in it and this type and I've got something that's plastic and there are different kinds of plastics, and I don't know which bin it goes into, makes the behavior more difficult. When they have pictures on top of the bins that show you can put this kind of article in this bin, that's a step that makes it easier. When they have combined recycling that everything can go in the same bin that makes it extremely easy, and then you're going to see the highest levels of recycling when it's that simple. Even in that case I know that you're going to still see people throw trash into the recycling bin and recycling into the trash bin. But nonetheless, that's how you're going to get the best recycling, is when you make the behavior as easy as possible. For most behaviors though we're somewhere in this range, and that's why we have to pay attention to the elephant which we will do in our next class but not today. Today we are going to focus on individual characteristics that affect what people do. Specifically, they're cognitions, skills and their behavioral intentions. Now, we know that behavioral intentions are the strongest predictor of behavior, but they are not identical with behavior. I don't know about you, but I have a long list of behaviors that I intend to do and don't do. I intend to floss every day, I intend to walk 10,000 steps every day, I intend to stop playing computer solitaire or looking at Facebook. Have I done those things consistently? Well, no, and that comes back to low motivation. We're going to look at just briefly what you need to know in order to get to the different kinds of behaviors that we've talked about. For the policy support and activism behaviors, we know that those are the five key beliefs that we've talked about previously. With energy conservation, basically, we just need to talk to people about the cost savings when you conserve energy, we don't need to mention climate change at all. However, if you do want to talk about climate change and energy conservation, then people need to understand the role of fossil fuels in energy use and how they cause climate change, and a large proportion of the American public doesn't understand that as you'll see a little later today. Many people in this country still think that the hole in the ozone layer is causing climate change because it's letting too much sunlight into Earth, it's letting too much heat in, and therefore, the best thing that they can do to reduce climate change is to stop using aerosol sprays, and it's wrong, it's completely wrong. So if we want to talk about climate change and energy use, we need to focus on getting people to understand the role of fossil fuels. This was a brilliant campaign in Australia that used black balloons to represent the carbon pollution being emitted from appliances as we use them, and we have a video online from this campaign that I would like you to look at. It shows the balloons coming out of all these different appliances, they go out the windows of the houses, and you see hundreds of black balloon's rising up into the sky. It makes a very powerful image of what we're doing when we use energy that I think is quite impactful. So take some time and look at that video, and then if you haven't seen it already, take time and look at that and then we'll go on. Then you can go on and watch the rest of this presentation. In terms of adaptation, we talked about these characteristics of psychological preparedness and they are mostly all cognitive, but there are a couple that involve affect as well, that there are affective dimensions as well as the cognitive components that determine whether people get it or not, and actually then are prepared psychologically to adapt to climate change. So summarizing where we've been so far, the rider, the elephant, and the path, are metaphors, they're shorthand for the cognitive and attitudinal and contextual factors that comprise the people in places model, and all three of them make a difference in behavior change. Most communication efforts are grounded in the theory of change that relies on some form of the knowledge-attitude-behavior hierarchy of effects. We've talked about previously that this model so often fails, it fails because of what we do here at the beginning in the knowledge part of that message, and insufficient shaping of what we're providing in order to engage the audience and overcome differences, their lack of interest or their resistance to the message. We have to shape this part accordingly to increase liking and persuasion while at the same time incorporating information that they want and information that we know that they need. That McGuire model is useful for encouraging us to look at all the factors that influence each step in the very complex sequence of changes that are going to lead to behavior change, and the importance of attitudinal changes as well as memory and skill acquisition, can all be lessened if we make the behavior as easy as possible so that it requires very little motivation, effort or skill. So I'd like you to take a few minutes now to jot down all the forms of knowledge. Think it through, everything that your target audience needs to know in order to enact the changes that you're asking them to make as part of your campaign, and think about the behavior itself. Is there a way you could make it simpler by changes to the physical or social environment? Chances are you can't do much about the physical environment, you may be able to but maybe not. But the social environment, think about norms, are there norms in your community that are impeding the behavior change? Think about those and then we'll continue from there.
