Climate Change Communications: Dipping A Toe Into Public Motivation

This report is based on research by "four professional communication, campaign and marketing strategists with decades of experience in public communications," who were concerned that major plans by campaign groups and the government to try to mobilise public action in the United Kingdom (UK) on climate change were
going to fail. They argue that many assumptions about what will convince 'the public' of the need to act on climate are seriously misconceived. Effective research on values and framing is one way to overcome this problem.

According to the report, opinion polls and surveys generally test 'opinion' or 'attitudes' and are superficial forms of research. Understanding behaviour (what people do, how they do it and why) is a better basis for extrapolating the likely effect of a communications proposition. The researchers state that decades of research indicate that what drives behaviours, and attitudes, are motivational needs. Seeing as campaigns are intended to bring about behavioural change, otherwise there will be no result, it makes sense to examine the psychological needs that determine behaviours. If communication can be arranged to meet these needs, then it stands the best chance of being effective.

A psychological survey conducted identified three 'Motivational Groups." The paper explains tha the Cultural Dynamics system based on Maslowian psychology and identifies three main sets of needs, matching the three main groups:

• Security or ‘sustenance’ needs (needs for belonging, identity, security/safety): people for whom with these needs are dominant, are the ‘Settlers’
• Esteem or ‘outer directed’ needs (the need for esteem of others and selfesteem): people for whom with these needs are dominant, are the ‘Prospectors’
• Inner-directed needs (needs such as an ethical basis for life, self exploration,finding meaning in life, discovering new truths) – the ‘Pioneers’

According to the report, many campaigns fail because they present a solution that addresses the perecived needs of one group but not others. To be effective across the population, campaigns need to be put in the three different sets of terms, to meet the different needs.

For example:

• settlers tend to look backwards, to yesterday (which was better) and dislike anything new or different as this threatens identity, belonging, security
• prospectors live in the now, for today, and seek rewards in terms of fashion, status, success, achievement and recognition, and are unconcerned with
  belonging, security or identity because they have that already
• pioneers look forwards, both in time and to new horizons: they like change, discovery, the unknown so long as it is ethically acceptable but are unworried
  about status because they have already met those needs

So in the case of ‘climate change’, if it was a long term global problem, they might think

• settlers: that’s not a problem unless it immediately affects my family, my local area, my identity, my traditions
• prospectors: that’s not a problem unless it affects my prospects for achievement and success
• pioneers: it’s a problem

The report further explains that campaigns need to make sure they are talking about the same thing, with common assumptions about what is intrinsically good and bad
about it, and how, if it’s a problem, it will be resolved. One way to think about this is ‘framing’. ‘Framing’ is meant to refer to the mental processes we use to construct
understanding.

Some considerations for campaigns based questions asked during the telephone survey for the research.

Who is most responsible for climate change?

Out of a range of seven possible answers, over 53% of respondents chose ‘We are all individually responsible’. Given this, it is possible to assume that the majority of the population (by a slim margin) are willing to change their behaviours based on ‘climate change’. If there is a significant opposition from one part of society, campaigns sometimes set out to ‘change minds’ there. When a culture has this level of acceptance of an issue, planners and decision makers need to create ways in which people can actually change their behaviour, rather than simply continuing to highlight the issue. The nature of change on offer must be geared to the differing needs of the three Motivational Groups.

Does anyone believe that no-one is responsible - that it’s just natural change?

Over 9% of the population believes this. This makes them uniquely unreceptive to calls for changes to individual behaviours to halt climate change.
They are less than one in ten of the population - but do they have the potential to change others’ behaviours? If so, who are they likely to influence? If NGOs or Government fund programmes that set out to refute arguments put forward by opponents of action on climate change who argue it is a totally natural occurrence and not something we can ‘stop’ or ‘reverse’, they may actually increase the numbers of people who will cease some of their current efforts while they undertake a ‘re-view’ of the issue. In other words, the programme becomes counter-productive because it raises a doubt which 91% of the population did not share.

Should funds go to programmes that portray climate change as ‘an emergency’?

Despite its popularity amongst campaigners, only 11% of respondents believe that climate change can be typified as ‘an emergency’. In other words, about 90% of people exposed to a message that states that climate change is an emergency will experience dissonance, and probably reject the message as not relevant to them. It may well be seen as ‘environment for environmentalists’.Overall, a programme of public communications that portrays climate change as an emergency may have a long-term counter-productive effect if people’s experiences in the future do not match the expectations they had when taking ‘emergency actions’.

The report proposes that it is possible to get a very different and detailed picture of people and their motivations in relation to possible campaign calls, through looking at psychological segments of the population rather than across the population as a whole.