The public’s (non)reaction to the mountains of data in support of human-driven climate change should be of interest to anyone engaged in an attempt to influence behavior through messaging. Whether you’re a card-carrying environmentalist or not, this phenomenon deserves attention because it indicates that our attempts at making the world a better place through the dispersal of information are bound to fail. In Behavior change causes changes in beliefs, not vice versa, David Roberts explains why Al Gore’s strategy of emphasizing the magnitude of the climate change problem in order to drive behavior change didn’t work.
Information and logic don’t drive people’s behavior — even if they think it does. Roberts says that it’s behavior that drives beliefs. And what, then, drives behavior? Identity. We do things to enforce who we think we are. So… if you want to change behaviors, you must appeal to your audience’s sense of identity.
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This is really intriguing! It rings intuitively true to me as a general rule, though of course there are individual exceptions, as well as–probably–certain types of behavior that people change based on knowledge.
Still, I think this idea warrants a lot of thought. Thanks for this post.
What an interesting idea. I wonder how one would do the work…somehow make it clear to a conservative, for instance, that this identity requires her to favor amending the Constitution to strip personhood from corporations so our government and economy could be under more rational control? I’ve seen articles in outdoors magazines about certain Christian groups that are working to protect the environment because they have come to see that their identity as Christians demands that they become good stewards of God’s gifts. It seems as if this way of changing behavior requires us to respect people enough to find our who they are to themselves and start from there if we want to persuade them to help us save the baby seals, the economy, the planet. And that sounds very realistic.