There’s a whiff of social engineering to identity campaigning, says Justin Rowlatt, BBC’s ‘ethical man’ on last night’s Analysis.
The piece opens with Soli from Futerra recounting her ‘magic wand’ experiment: she asked a group of environmentalists how many of them would magic away climate change if people were left unchanged after its disappearance. Apparently, precious [...]

In our book, Tom and I wrote about how people often use maladaptive coping mechanisms as a means of psychologically warding off the threats posed by environmental challenges.
We suggested (on page 49) that environmental organizations can approach this problematic aspect of identity by developing:
“approaches that help people express the fear, anger, sadness, angst, or sense [...]

Here’s Do The Green Thing’s spoof promotion for Nothing:

Pretty cool, eh? Do the Green Thing say:
Shopping is a buzz, an energy, but it uses energy too, all the energy needed to make all the things we shop for. So if you’ve got to shop but want to see the global temperature drop, buy the green [...]

Solitaire Townsend, Director of Futerra ‘Sustainability Communications’, writes:
The notion of changing the audience rather than the message is at the heart of the ‘identity campaigning’ concept led by WWF. Identity campaigning argues that we shouldn’t accept the basic psychology of our audience – but seek to change it.
This means re-programming people’s values away from consumption, [...]

This TED Talk by Dan Pink lays it out beautifully.  Extrinsic rewards (as presumed by the theory of self-interest) lead to poor performance in every situation except where (a) the rules are clearly defined and (b) the outcome is known in advance.  The challenges we face are NOT this kind of problem.
Link to Video [Embedding [...]

Adam Corner just pointed this ad out to me. What are the likely impacts of an advertisement like this? Ed Gillespie suggests that it will be counterproductive, because…
the danger is that by pumping up the high octane drama of an ad, you increase the risk of viewers feeling manipulated and dismissing it as pure propaganda
Another [...]

I have written previously on this blog about veering dramatically from hope to despair, and I think I may have found the reason for it.  I think it’s because as a society we are travelling in two opposite directions, at the same time, at increasing speed.  Two recent articles relating to economics and CSR really bring [...]

George Monbiot does us all a huge service by underscoring the importance of beginning to understand and respond to the psychological impact of an awareness of climate change.
Old men, George Monbiot suggests in Clive James isn’t a sceptic, he’s a sucker - but this may be the reason (today’s Guardian), may be more [...]

Also published at Cognitive Policy Works.
This video was released as part of Bill McKibben’s global awareness-building exercise last week for 350.org,an organization promoting the idea that carbon emission levels above 350 parts per million are dangerous:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdz555JBIwY&feature=player_embedded

I’d like to treat this as a case study in visual metaphors and conceptual frames to show how insights into [...]

A couple of weeks ago a new ad started being shown on television in the UK highlighting the need to act on CO2. In the light of how many of the posts here touch on advertising, I would be interested in identity campaigners’ views on it. It’s at the bottom of DECC’s [...]