Hello, everyone, welcome to the fifth lecture in the sequence of lectures about communicating climate change and health. Today we're going to talk about interpersonal and social influence on what we do, and how we can use that in our communications with our audiences. We're going to talk first about social norms, both descriptive and injunctive norms, I'll define those for you in a moment, and how they shape human behavior. Then we're going to talk about the diffusion of innovations, which is the theory concerned with how social change happens when there are new beliefs, technologies, behaviors, attitudes. How they spread through a social system through a multi-step flow of information. And finally, we're going to talk about the role of opinion leadership in diffusing innovations. We tend not to be aware of it, but we have a strong tendency to follow our herd and our leaders, to do what the other people around us are doing. And we're not really aware of how much we are influenced, except sometimes, like [COUGH] when I travel, there are different norms about whether you jaywalk or not, depending on the community you're in. And I will consciously look to see, do people jaywalk here or not? And then I will follow what everyone else does. That's a case in which the norm is apparent, and I'm thinking about it, I'm attending to it and responding to it. But for the most part, we don't notice how much we are influenced by what other people around us are doing. So there are two types of norms. There are the descriptive norms, which describe what's going on, what other people are doing. And those set my behavior, largely, they set our behavior, largely. But there are also injunctive norms, which tell us what we should do, and those come to us from people who are in authority. In the case of jaywalking, there's an injunctive norm against it. Nonetheless, if everyone else breaks it, so will I. We pay close attention to the beliefs, and attitudes, and behaviors of those in our group. But we're not really aware of how much that is shaping us, how much were attending to it, and shaping our behavior accordingly. Consumption is a good example of this. This is what most people like me do. They go out and buy things. They buy things for themselves and they buy things for other people. If I recognize that our consumption is bad for the Earth and is increasing our carbon emissions, it's something that I really want us to reduce, and I stop buying as much as other people buy, then I will look different. I will seem different to the people around me. It makes me stand out a little bit in a way that can be uncomfortable. And in terms of gifts, gee, she doesn't give things to other people in the way that everyone else in the group is doing. That is kind of, gee, is she stingy? Acting outside the norm can be uncomfortable. In terms of injunctive norms, they're our perceptions of what we should do, and they come to us from positions of authority. They also come to us from people who are cool, popular, the people who are the trendsetters. What are they doing? I want to be like them. So they're setting a kind of injunctive norm. This is what you need to do if you want to be popular and cool, and I attend to that as well. This is what people who I respect think I should do. There are a number of studies that have looked at normative influences and how they shape our behavior. Most of this research is strongly associated with Robert Cialdini. He has really spearheaded this area of research. His colleagues and students have done all of the studies that we're going to talk about today that show how descriptive norms and injunctive norms change our behavior and how we can use them. This was just a brilliant study that has a story behind it. In the Petrified Forest, there was a sign up at the entrance that said, your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time. Now, that is a descriptive norm saying people steal the wood. It was one of Bob Cialdini's grad students who came up with the idea of for this study. She was visiting the Petrified Forest, she read this sign, and instantaneously had the thought, I'd better get mine. And then she realized that she was responding to the descriptive norm. And so she and Cialdini worked with the Park Service to develop two different norm messages, which they went on to test. So there was a descriptive norm message that said, many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest. Lots of people do this. And the text accompanying this was a picture of multiple visitors, three of them, stealing wood. The injunctive norm message that they used in place of that. So the descriptive norm was going to lead to stealing. They replaced it with an injunctive norm message that said, please don't remove the petrified wood from the park in order to preserve the park. And that was accompanied by a picture of a single person stealing wood, who was pictured inside a red circle with a bar over his hand. They had a very clever dependent measure in this study. Along the pathway leading away from where the sign was posted, two different pathways with the two different signs, they placed specially marked pieces of petrified wood. And then they counted, after a period of time had passed, how many people stole those marked pieces of petrified wood from each of the paths. And what they saw was that with the people who read the descriptive norm message, almost 8% of them stole wood from the Petrified Forest. With the injunctive norm message, you got just under 2% of the visitors stealing wood. A highly significant difference in terms of how much theft was occurring by not drawing attention to the descriptive norm that said people steal. So when descriptive norms are encouraging the wrong behavior, it's more effective to invoke injunctive norms in messaging. And we who are communicating about the environment, we have lots of messages that do exactly this, that reinforce the perception that the harmful behavior is the norm for our society. So here are some examples. According to data from the US Department of Transportation, average American driver puts in 13,474 miles behind the wheel each year. 71% of American adults are overweight or obese. Americans eat an average of 271 pounds of meat annually. And 1.73 million passengers drive domestically in the US every day. These messages backfire. They don't lead people to say, gee, we're eating too much meat, I should eat less. What they lead to is people saying, gee, people eat a lot of meat, and then they say, I shouldn't eat so much meat. But they do eat a lot of meat, and so I continue doing the meat, while saying, I shouldn't eat so much meat here. So that is not the way to go. If the wrong behavior's the social norm, use injunctive norms instead. Descriptive norms can be harmful when the harmful behavior's prevalent, they can be effective when the beneficial behaviors are prevalent. But there's a caveat to this. This was another very clever study. Wesley Schultz and a number of colleagues, including Bob Cialdini, performed this study on energy use. And I want to say that in the State of California, the results from this study have been used in our communications from our utility, in terms of the feedback we get from the utility on our energy usage. So they went around a neighborhood and put door hangers on the front door that had handwritten messages. The handwritten information about the household's energy use, and the energy use of the average household in the neighborhood. And then there were suggestions on how to conserve energy. That was the descriptive norm condition. The second condition used both descriptive and injunctive norms. The combined message had all of that same information, the descriptive norm information. But it added a happy or a sad face to communicate the injunctive message, based on whether the household had used more or less than the neighborhood average. And all of the messages included the university logo. So we have an authoritative, respected source of the message that's providing the information, or also providing approval or disapproval of what you're doing. In the descriptive norm condition, the households that were consuming more energy than the average for their neighborhood went on to consume less energy over the next time period. But the households that had previously consumed less than the neighborhood average went on to consume more energy over the next period. So they were doing better than the average, but they saw that the norm was that other people are using more, so they started using more energy as well. In the households that got both the descriptive norm and the injunctive norm, that backfiring, that boomerang disappeared. All households consumed less than the baseline average. So the conclusion here is that when highlighting the descriptive norms for prevalent beneficial behaviors, you should be sure to recognize them as beneficial and praiseworthy. So in at least two utility companies in California, they provide feedback on how you compare to other people. And they actually use the emoticons in order to communicate whether that is a beneficial and praiseworthy or a disapproved of action. All right, now, in terms of descriptive norms, I'd like to talk a little bit about citizen activism. The norms and the stereotypes that are associated with activism that make it less likely that people are going to engage in advocating for mitigation. Environmental activism is counter-normative in most of the United States. Only about a third of Americans consider themselves to be environmentalists. And when asked why they wouldn't contact an elected official about climate change, a third of Americans responded, I'm not an activist. A study by Bashir and colleagues looked at the stereotypes. They asked people, so when you think of an environmentalist, what do you think of? And these are the terms that people come up with in order to describe environmentalists. And they're here in order, according to how often, how frequently that people used this term to describe environmentalists. And look at how many of them are negative or outside the norm. Vegetarianism isn't negative, necessarily, but it's not the norm here. Same goes for tree-huggers. But we've got hippies, unhygienic, militant, eccentric, overreactive, unfashionable, self-righteous, drug users, hairy, stupid, zealous, intolerant. I don't want to be any of those things. So the liberals, the crazy liberals are the ones who are environmentalists. I'm not like that. If we want to foster new descriptive norms to build an issue public for climate change, then we need to show the behaviors that we're promoting being performed by people who look like the target audience to combat this sense that people who are advocates for the climate are counter-normative. This also applies for any other kind of behavior that we're trying to promote. So here we see a picture of a minority family, African-American family buying organic farm products. We see suburban families using bicycles, families growing their own food. Imagery like this, using the target audience that you're interested in reaching, can help to increase the behavior. This one shows a family putting together their emergency, Kit for if they have an extreme weather event. Show people who are performing the behavior that you want to promote, and who look like the target audience. You can also use people who are very trendy and popular. This lovely woman has her reusable shopping bag with her. You can be as cool as her if you also carry a reusable shopping bag. But it doesn't have to be someone who is beautiful. Certainly, the ostriches aren't. But it shows that the text here, Recognizes people who are engaged in the kind of behavior that we want to promote as being commendable. So to encourage injunctive norms supporting greener behaviors, it suggests that environmentally friendly beliefs and behaviors are admired and that they're trendy.
