Now we're going to talk about the diffusion of innovations and the multi-step flow of information and opinion leadership. This model by Everett Rogers, the diffusion of innovations model was developed back in the 1950s. Rogers published a book on the diffusion of innovations that went through five different additions from the time that he first published this way back in the '50s right up until the time of Roger death in the early 2000s. It has been used internationally and very, very often to understand how changes happening within a system, for all different types of behaviors, attitudes and beliefs. We understand a lot about how change happens and how the characteristics of the people who are in each of these categories here differ and then how we can use that in terms of helping to diffuse an innovation more quickly. First of all, you have at the far end, the innovators. Small proportion of the US public, or I shouldn't say the US public, of any public, and they tend to be a little bit outside the social system within which they live. A little bit social isolates. However, they are closely connected to other people who are interested in whatever they are most interested in. So if they are interested in a particular type of technology, they will know other people in distant communities who are also interested in that same kind of technology. It applies to fashion, and hairstyles and health practices. All sorts of behaviors that are new. The innovators are paying attention to that and they tend to get their information from the mass media. Then the early adopters, the next 13.5 percent of the population tend to be people who are respected within the community and who have wide social networks. They are in contact with the innovators. They learn about this from the innovators, and adopt the innovation. The early majority are looking to those early adopters and follow what they are doing, and then you see quite a few people adopting. That's a third of the population. The late majority are a bit slower to pick up on the change, but we now have half the population doing it. They follow along it. They adopt too. The last group here, the laggards, may or may not. They're the last ones to adopt and they may or may not adopt. We don't necessarily get up to a 100 percent for every innovation. In fact, I think we rarely get up to a 100 percent. This term, laggards, is really insulting and people tried for decades to get Rogers to change the term to something that was less pejorative, but he never did and I'm not sure why. But be that as it may, what we are most concerned with in our work is these early adopters. So the innovators are people who are adventuresome. They're willing to stand outside the social norms. I would point in this case to people who are vegans at this point. They are trying to promote. They're clearly different from what we're doing. Culturally as Americans, we eat a lot of meat. Someone who, not only gives up meat, but also gives up dairy and eggs, that's a person who is really standing outside the norm. The early adopters are people who tend to be quite respected. The early majority, people who are deliberate in their changes, they think about things and they look to those who are in authority. The late majority tend to be skeptical of change and the laggards are the people who are very traditional in their beliefs, that they hold onto what the prior norm was and hold of that fast and don't want to give up on that way of doing things or thinking about things. So this chart shows the roles that media communication and interpersonal communication play when there's an adoption. I want to say by adoptions, I'm not talking simply about adopting a practice or a technology, but I'm also talking about adopting a belief. So this applies, for example, to recognizing that extreme weather is increasing and that we need to adapt to it. The first people who adopt an innovation are those who are using more mass media. There's not much communication inter-personally about the change at first. So our innovators are learning about it from mediated communications. Over time, we see more and more people who are adopting are doing it due to interpersonal communication. So the early adopters get the information from the mass media and the later adopters are more likely to get it from interpersonal communication. This model of a two-step flow of information of communication was developed back in the 1950s by Elihu Katz, and it is too simple. It oversimplifies what's taking place, but still it was a starting point force and it's still a useful model to think about in terms of how mass media and social influence interact. So the effect of the media, of mass mediated information tends to be indirect for the largest proportion people in the public. The people who are opinion leaders within a social system convey what they have learned from the mass media to other people within the system. So you have a two-step flow from the media to the opinion leader, to the rest of us. With the Climate Change in the American Mind data, we have assessed opinion leadership on climate change, and I have it plotted here for you by the Six Americas. This was an index of five different communication behaviors related to opinion leadership, and you see just the pattern that you would expect in terms of the degree to which people are opinion leaders on the issue. Particularly, we're looking at the alarm here. They have scores of almost two out of five behaviors. So that's better than everybody else, but it's still not very high in terms of opinion leadership. On our scale from zero to five, they're not even to the midpoint on the scale. That points to a very important goal for us in terms of how we plan our campaigns, the strategy that we're going to use, that we want to engage those people. I want to show you here an example of an extremely successful opinion leader campaign. This was conducted by Kelly and his colleagues, and the objective was to reduce unprotected sex among gay man. What they did was in three different communities; Biloxi, Monroe, and Hattiesburg, they did surveys of men who frequented gay bars and identified through the surveys people who were popular trend setters. So they were identified as opinion leaders. They recruited those trend setters to participate in the study. They were trained in peer education, and they were contracted to communicate risk reduction recommendations and endorsements of these behaviors that are going to reduce risk to their friends. The results show dramatic reductions in the proportions of gay men who were engaged in unprotected sex from the baseline levels in all three trial communities. So in Biloxi, they had close to 37 percent who were engaged in unsafe practices before the campaign. The campaign was initiated here, and the proportions come down to less than 30 percent and they maintain. This was a rolling campaign. They went into Biloxi first. The next month, they went into Monroe. We see decreases from 42 percent down to about 34 percent. Down here in Hattiesburg, the last town that received the campaign, it went down from about 33 percent to about 29 percent. So big decreases in the harmful behavior as a result of peer influence from using opinion leaders who have been trained to communicate the information, which brings us back to the alarmed. This is Alarmed Alice. We know a lot about her, that she has high certainty, that climate change is happening. She understands human causation and she perceives the threat as high. She is uncertain about the effectiveness of action, both collective and her own. So high risk perceptions, not so high in terms of efficacy. She doesn't know what she can do that is really going to make a difference. She tends to be a high public affairs media user, and we can reach her then because of that through mediated sources. She has very high potential as an opinion leader. But as we saw looking at the means, she's not doing it yet, not to the degree to which she could. We want to give her information on the effectiveness of action to give her help, and one of the most important things that we can tell her, perhaps the most important thing that we can tell her, is if she talks to people around her about climate change, she can change their beliefs and their behaviors and bring them on board. Most of the other people who she's going to be in contact with, who are in the lower less engaged segments, say the cautious, and the disengaged, the doubtful, to some degree the concerned, they are less certain, less engaged. If she talks to them, she can have the same kind of influence that we saw in terms of smoking cessation in the Framingham network analysis. So we want to provide her with information that tells her how much power she does have to influence other people if she will simply talk to them about what she believes, what she cares about on climate change, and get her on board to take action. So teach her how to talk about the issue and encourage her to share what she's learned with others. So in working with Alarmed Alice, to train her to talk about climate change, start by increasing her sense of efficacy by explaining to her the power of social influence. Very, very few people recognize just how powerful interpersonal influence is. The research that Christakis and Fowler have done on social influence shows that each of us influence up to a 1,000 other people; our friends to their friends to their friends. Three links away. Therefore, what we do influences so many other people around us. Sharing that information is going to be a surprising fact, which will make it more memorable for her, and it can be effective in building her sense that, yes, what I do can make a difference. Even though reducing my own carbon footprint may have a microscopic impact on global emissions. When you think about the emissions of 1,000 people around me being reduced, then it starts to feel like, "Okay. This is really going to make a difference." So having helped to understand that she has more power than she recognizes, go on to train her how to communicate using the model that Katharine Hayhoe provided in her elevator pitch. First step is to connect with the person that she's speaking to around a shared value, one of the cultural or moral values. For example, in saying that she loves Texas, Katharine Hayhoe was invoking in-group loyalty. I'm a Texan, you're a Texan, we love Texas, and here's what's at risk. After that shared connection has been made, the personal connection around a shared value, then Alice should go on to talk about the five key beliefs. That there's a scientific consensus, that climate change is real, harmful, and human caused, and also that it's important for her to communicate that the threat can be reduced if we act now. Then when communicating about the harmfulness of climate change, Alice should focus on a local impact, something that is happening in her community, like Katharine Hayhoe talking about water shortages in Texas. Then she should also talk about solutions to give the people that she's talking to hope and also something that they can do in order to make a difference as well. So in conclusion, climate change communicators can reach less engaged audiences through the opinion leadership of the alarmed, and the alarmed are willing to attend closely to information that less engaged audiences aren't interested in. So by getting the alarmed to pay attention and to talk about it, we can reach then other people. Recall that when we talked about persuasion, interpersonal communication is the way that persuasion happens. Through the mass media, through mediated communications, we can make people aware of the issue, bring it to their attention, make them recognize that, "Oh, this is in the news. This is an important issue, I guess, because it's in the news all the time," but we're unlikely to persuade them that way. It's the interpersonal influence that is going to make the difference. So we want to have a multi-pronged approach to influencing the public by using one type of message that is going to reach through the mass media to large numbers of people, but then a second strategy will be to specifically target Alice to get her to use her influence effectively.
