Connection Café: Peer Pressure

	Peer Pressure
	Posted by Joey Martin at Feb 23, 2009 04:53 PM CST Categories: Constituent Empowerment

Peer Pressure

Every day I sound and look a little bit more like my mother – not that there is anything wrong with that. (She is usually the first one to read these posts.) Almost daily I hear her in my head or hear her words coming out of my mouth including one of her favorites, “It is not what you say, it is how you say it.” And psychologists have proven my mother right – at least regarding choosing your words carefully.

Researchers at Arizona State University did a study in conjunction with a local hotel asking people to reuse their towels. They randomly used one of five messages in 260 rooms and determined which one of the messages lead to highest reuse of towels. The five messages were:

• “Help the hotel save energy”
• “Help save the environment”
• “Partner with us to help save the environment”
• “Help save resources for future generations”
• “Join your fellow citizens in helping to save the environment”

Peer pressure works. The “Join your fellow citizens” message rated the highest percentage of towel recycling with 44%, second best were the messages encouraging protection of the environment and conservation for future generations with percentages around 31%. And the least effective messages were ones that mentioned the benefit to the hotel. The "Join your fellow citizens" message is called a descriptive norm message and is more successful because (as psychologists know) people are influenced by the behavior of others. Use of descriptive norms are common in the for-profit world, for example “9 out of 10 People Choose our Brand” but using descriptive norms to promote a cause is often overlooked.

Understanding descriptive norms is important for cause related organizations. You have to be careful that the messages you send don’t infer what you don’t want. For example, if you use the headline “Tobacco Use is On the Rise” in a smoking cessation campaign the message regarding the behaviors of others is “everybody is smoking”. Crafting a message that highlights positive behavior by the “norm” can be more effective means of persuasion, in this example making sure your message implies “everybody is not smoking”.

If you want to up the ante on this innate human reaction tie the message to a group that the audience identifies with. People tend to conform the most to those they identify with and to groups they feel connected to. (Take a University of Texas football game - don’t go if you don’t have burnt orange on at least 25% of your body.) The response to your smoking cessation campaign would improve if you can use a group your audience identifies with, for example, “Longhorns are less likely to smoke than Aggies” or “More than Half of Americans are Non-Smokers”. (Both of these statistics are made up.)

Humans are more willing to comply when we feel like others like us are doing the same thing. Try tapping into this intrinsic human reaction the next time you ask for an action or donation from your constituents.

Goldstein, N. J., Cialdini, R. B., & Griskevicius, V. (2005). A room with a viewpoint: Using norm-based appeals to motivate conservation behaviors in a hotel setting.

Peer Pressure

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