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Getting Creative: How to create stunning Political Artwork

March 27, 2020

Creating political artwork is a great activity to engage supporters and allies over. But often organisations call them to send their contributions, without offering much guidance. This often results in contributions being of poor quality, and lacking the visual consistency that would contribute to the campaign “brand” visibility.

Some organisations like 350.org are engaging with their supporters and provide them with training kits for creative aRtivism. A clever way to keep people engaged and at the same time offering them to develop new skills.

The free kit can be accessed HERE

How to do an Audience Analysis

February 7, 2020

This article was curated from COMPASS

An audience analysis is a process used to identify and understand the priority and influencing audiences for a SBCC strategy. The priority and influencing audiences are those people whose behavior must change in order to improve the health situation. A complete audience analysis looks at:

Socio-demographic characteristics such as sex, age, language and religion.
Geographic characteristics like where the audience lives and how that might impact behavior.
Psychographic characteristics such as needs, hopes, concerns and aspirations.
Audience thoughts, beliefs, knowledge and current actions related to the health or social issue.
Barriers and facilitators that prevent or encourage audience members to adopt the desired behavior change.
Gender and how it impacts audience members’ behavior and ability to change.
Effective communication channels for reaching the audience.

Why Conduct an Audience Analysis?

An audience analysis informs the design of materials, messages, media selection and activities of a SBCC strategy. It establishes a clear, detailed and realistic picture of the audience. As a result, messages and activities are more likely to resonate with the audience and lead to the desired change in behaviors.

Who Should Conduct an Audience Analysis?

A small, focused team should conduct the audience analysis. Members should include communication staff, health/social service staff and, when available, research staff.

Stakeholders should also be involved throughout the process. Consider effective ways to engage stakeholders to gain feedback and input, including: in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, community dialogue, small group meetings, taskforce engagement and participatory stakeholder workshops.

When Should Audience Analysis Be Conducted?

An audience analysis should be conducted at the beginning of a program or project, in conjunction with a situation analysis and program analysis. The team should start thinking about the audience during the desk review and fill in any gaps during the stakeholder workshop. It is part of the Inquiry phase of the P Process.

Estimated Time Needed

Completing an audience analysis can take up to three to four weeks. When estimating time, consider the existing audience-related data, what gaps need to be filled and whether additional stakeholder or audience input is needed. Allow for additional time if formative research is needed to fill in any gaps that may exist in the literature.

Learning Objectives

After completing the activities in the audience analysis guide, the team will:

Determine the priority audience.
Determine the influencing audience(s).
Describe the priority and influencing audience(s).
Develop an audience profile for each priority and influencing audience(s).

Prerequisites

Situation Analysis

Steps

Step 1: Identify Potential Audience(s)

To address the problem statement and achieve the vision decided upon during the situation analysis, brainstorm and list all potential audiences that are affected by or have control over the health or social problem. For example, if the problem is high unmet need for family planning, potential audiences may be:

Step 2: Select the Priority Audience

An effective SBCC strategy must focus on the most important audience. The priority audience is not always the most affected audience, but is the group of people whose behavior must change in order to improve the health situation. The number of priority audiences depends mainly on the number of audiences whose practice of the behavior will significantly impact the problem. For example, priority audiences may be:

To identify the priority audience(s), keep in mind the vision and health or social problem. Then consider:

Who is most affected
How many people are in the audience
How important it is that the audience change their behavior
How likely it is that the audience will change their behavior
Who controls the behavior or the resources required for a behavior change

Step 3: Identify Priority Audience Characteristics

Identify the socio-demographic, geographic and psychographic characteristics of each priority audience. Include their communication preferences and other opportunities to reach them.

Organize priority audience information in a table (see Audience Characteristics and Behavioral Factors Template under templates).

Step 4: Identify Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices

Understand what the priority audience knows, thinks, feels and does about the problem in order to determine the audiences’ stage of behavior change. This allows the program to tailor messages and activities based on the audience’s knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors.

There are a number of ideational factors that commonly influence individual behavior and should be considered when examining the audience’s knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors.

The situation analysis, stakeholder workshop and any additional quantitative or qualitative research will indicate what the priority audience currently does in reference to the problem and what the audience knows, thinks and feels about the problem or desired behavior. Keeping in mind the ideational factors, examine that research to understand each priority audience. Ask questions such as:

What does the priority audience already know (knowledge) about the problem?
How does the priority audience feel about the problem (attitude)?
How does the priority audience see their role with respect to the problem (self-image)?
Does the priority audience feel at risk of having the problem? How at risk do they feel (risk perception)?
What are the community’s beliefs and attitudes toward the health problem (social norms)?
How capable does the priority audience feel about being able to take action to address the problem (self-efficacy)?
What emotional reaction does the priority audience have towards the health problem (emotions)?
What level of support does the priority audience believe they would receive from family members or the community (social support and influence)?
How capable does the priority audience feel about discussing how to reduce the problem (personal advocacy)?

Add this information to the table (see Audience Characteristics and Behavioral Factors Template under templates).

Step 5: Identify Barriers and Facilitators

It is crucial to know what prevents or encourages the priority audience to practice the desired behavior. Identify barriers and facilitators of change in the literature and list them in the table (see Audience Characteristics and Behavioral Factors Template under templates).If the desk review does not adequately identify behavioral factors, conduct additional qualitative research (interviews, focus groups) with members of the priority audience. Some important barriers to consider include:

Habit: People are comfortable doing things the same way they have always done them.
Fear: People expect change to bring negative consequences.
Negative experience: Some audiences may have had a bad experience, such as with the health care system, and thus may be cynical or resistant to change.

If the desired behavior requires adopting/utilizing products or services, consider issues of availability, accessibility, affordability and acceptability.

Step 6: Consider Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is the process of dividing the priority audience into sub groups according to at least one similar characteristic that will affect the success of the SBCC effort. Look at the selected priority audience and decide if it is similar enough that it can be effectively reached by the same set of channels, messages and interventions. Ask the following questions about the priority audience to decide if segmentation is necessary:

Are any audience members particularly difficult to reach, requiring a different set of channels?
Do any audience members have distinct views or concerns about the problem?
Do any audience members require a different message to reach them effectively?
Are any audience members at greater risk?

If yes, the audience may need to be segmented further. See the audience segmentation guide for more information on how to identify and prioritize audiences so that messages and interventions can be most effectively targeted.

Some urban women of reproductive age may have different concerns or views about family planning. One group might be afraid of side effects while another group does not use family planning because they do not know where family planning services are available. These groups would require different messages and interventions and should be segmented if resources allow.

Step 7: Identify Key Influencers

Based on the priority or segmented audience, identify the key influencers. Search the situation analysis, stakeholder workshop and any qualitative research findings for indications of who strongly influences the priority audience’s behavior (see Audience Focused Literature Review Chart Template under templates). Influencers can be individuals or groups. Their different roles – as friends, family, leaders, teachers, health providers and of course, the media – often determine their level of influence. Consider the following factors to help identify influencing audiences:

Who has the most impact on the priority audience’s health-related behavior and what is their relationship to the priority audience?
Who makes or shapes the priority audience’s decisions in the problem area?
Who influences the priority audience’s behavior positively and who influences it negatively?

Step 8: Organize Influencing Audience Information

For each influencing audience identified, search the literature to identify information about them and their relationship to the priority audience. Look for:

How strongly the group influences the priority audience
What behaviors they encourage the priority audience to practice
Why they would encourage or discourage the desired behavior
How to reach them

Organize information on influencing audiences in another table for later use in the SBCC strategy (see Influencing Audiences Template under templates):

Step 9: Develop Audience Profiles

Review the notes about each audience and try to tell the story of that person. Audience profiles bring audience segments to life by telling the story of an imagined individual from the audience.

The audience profile consists of a paragraph with details on current behaviors, motivation, emotions, values and attitudes, as well as information such as age, income level, religion, sex and where they live. The profile should reflect the primary barriers the audience faces in adopting the desired behavior. Include a name and photo to help the creative team visualize who the person is. Answers to the following questions can lead to insightful profiles that help the team understand and reach audiences more effectively:

The audience profiles will feed directly into the creative brief process and will be an integral part of the SBCC strategy. See the Samples section for an example of an audience profile.

Templates

Audience Characteristics and Behavioral Factors Template

Audience-Focused Literature Review Template

Influencing Audience Template

Samples

Sample Audience Profile

Tips & Recommendations

Talk to audience members. Do not rely solely on the project team’s beliefs or what program staff and health workers say or assume about the audiences.
Put yourself in the audience’s shoes. To truly understand what audiences know, think and feel, set aside assumptions and preconceived notions.
Work in teams. The collaboration among team members (four or five people recommended) will provide richer and deeper insights into the issues. If possible, include people who have direct experience working or living in the community.
Find other ways to gather information. It is important to recognize that some documents may have information gaps that will require additional inquiries (formative research) to fully understand the potential audience. Interviews with local experts (e.g. medical and public health staff) can help explain the issue and identify those most at risk or affected by it.
Incorporate the communication channels prioritized during the stakeholder workshop. Also consider other opportunities to reach audiences, such as places (e.g., schools, clinics) and events (e.g., health fairs, community events). SBCC strategies can take advantage of such opportunities to connect with audience members about the topic.
The priority audience’s perception about how the community views an issue may differ from how the community actually views the issue. The perception of what the family/community thinks often will be the deciding factor when it comes to taking a health action. This can prevent the individual from taking the best action. Addressing the misperceptions with your program or campaign could lead to a more successful behavior change intervention than one that does not address misperceptions.
Audience profiles should represent the experience of real people. This will help the program team better understand the audiences they are trying to reach and ensure that audience members see themselves in the messages developed for them.
No two audience profiles should look the same; the best profiles use qualitative research as a source. Profiles are living documents that should be updated when new information becomes available.

Lessons Learned

Designing messages and activities with shared characteristics in mind increases the likelihood of audience members identifying with the issue and feeling able to address it.

Glossary & Concepts

Priority audience refers to a group of people whose behavior must change in order to improve the health situation. It is the most important group to address because they have the power to make changes the SBCC campaign calls for. Sometimes this is also referred to as the intended audience.
An influencing audience is made up of those people who have the most significant and direct influence (positive or negative) over the priority audience. The influencing audience can exist at different levels: at the family level, community level (e.g. peers, relatives, teachers, community or faith-based leaders) or national or regional level (e.g. policy makers, media personnel, government leaders).
Demographic information is statistical data (e.g. age, sex, education level, income level, geographic location) relating to a population and specific sub-groups of that population.
Psychographics are the attributes that describe personality, attitudes, beliefs, values, emotions and opinions. Psychographic characteristics or factors relate to the psychology or behavior of the audience.
Ideation refers to how new ways of thinking (or new behaviors) are diffused through a community by means of communication and social interaction among individuals and groups. Behavior is influenced by multiple social and psychological factors, as well as skills and environmental conditions that facilitate behavior.
Ideational factors are grouped into three categories: cognitive, emotional and social. Cognitive factors address an individual’s beliefs, values and attitudes (such as risk perceptions), as well as how an individual perceives what others think should be done (subjective norms), what the individual thinks others are actually doing (social norms) and how the individual thinks about him/herself (self-image). Emotional factors include how an individual feels about the new behavior (positive or negative) as well as how confident a person feels that they can perform the behavior (self-efficacy). Social factors consist of interpersonal interactions (such as support or pressure from friends) that convince someone to behave in a certain way, as well as the effect on an individual’s behavior from trying to persuade others to adopt the behavior as well (personal advocacy).
Gender refers to the socially and culturally constructed roles and responsibilities deemed appropriate for men and women. Such constructions influence how males and females behave. In many cases, the way a community defines gender roles and expectations disadvantages women and girls. For example, if community norms dictate that boys should eat meat and vegetables while girls get rice and porridge, mothers will have difficulty ensuring that girls get enough of the right foods to be healthy.
Barriers to change prevent or make it difficult to adopt a behavior. Barriers come in many forms – emotional, societal, structural, educational, familial, etc.
Facilitators of change make it easier to adopt a behavior. As with barriers, they can take many forms.

Resources and References

Resources

A Field Guide to Designing a Health Communication Strategy

Conducting a Social Marketing Campaign

Leadership in Strategic Communication: Making a Difference in Infectious Disease and Reproductive Health

Ideation

The Transtheoretical Model

Theories of Behavior Change

References

O’Sullivan, G.A., Yonkler, J.A., Morgan, W., and Merritt, A.P. A Field Guide to Designing a Health Communication Strategy, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs, March 2003.
The Market Pro. Knowing Your Audience – Demographics and Psychographics.
UNICEF (2008). Writing a Communication Strategy for Development Programmes: A Guideline for Programme Managers and Communication Officers.
The Health Communication Unit, Centre for Health Promotion. Online Health Program Planner. University of Toronto.

Creative Engagement on Instagram

November 8, 2019

IG has become the favorite way to share among teens and young adults, beating out Facebook and Twitter. In the US, young people 18-29 years old make up half of the users on Instagram.

What makes Instagram different from social media networks such as Facebook or Twitter is the way people use it. Instagrammers frequently check the site, often several times a day, and engage with posts at a much higher rate than with other social networks.

We have compiled in this article some tips shared by non-profit users on how to make the best of IG to increase the level of engagement with your followers, and beyond:

Videos get more than 20% more engagement than static content, according to a study by Quintly. The same report notices that the use of hashtags seems to decrease interaction.
People prefer to connect with people, much more than brands and logos. Having a personalized presence increases your reach on Instagram and creates deeper connections with donors and supporters. This means that your communication on IG c/should sometimes share your personal stories, away from your cause or mission. Just you, your cat, etc.
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Likewise, sharing from time to time content that is NOT related to your cause but to other subjects that your (potential) audience is interested in (including entertainment, art, etc.) can make your content more “relatable” to people and help them associate your account with pleasant content (see “pairing” tactic for comm on the online course).
You have 2,200 characters for captions, and if you exceed three lines of text the caption will be truncated. While there is no definitive study on whether lengthy captions encourage or discourage engagement, the caption needs in any case to be catchy from the outset, so directly addressing the target audience rather then repeating what is in the image. An example of how this works is to post an enigmatic/confusing/intriguing picture and asking the audience for its opinion (remember that blue or gold dress ??). Be aware that longer captions are preferred by the algorithm, so if you rely on them it pays off to spend time on captions.
On IG too it pays off to focus sometimes on the user instead of the cause. E.g. a post by @doctorswithoutborders : « #mentalhealthweek we’re highlighting some of the de-stressing tips we give our aid workers. These tips can also help you!⁣⁣ »
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The avalanche of photos on snapchat makes original artwork stand out. Consider using less photos and more creative artwork which, if you are consistent with the graphic design, can become part of your « brand ».

The IG “stories” feature (a slideshow of pics and/or videos that disappear after a day) seems to be the most popular feature (Some report 500 million users of stories each day). Here are a few tips on how to make stories work for your engagement:

As it focuses on storytelling and storytelling being a nr1 campaign tool, there seems to be a point in using this feature more. Especially in places where these are not yet popular, it can really help to get better noticed by your followers, as your story will show up on your followers’ feed.

It could particularly be interesting to use this feature as a “medium is the message” tool. A good example of this was the WWF “last selfie” campaign on snapchat where the organisation used the ephemeral nature of Snapchat (pictures disappear after a short while) to encourage users to screenshot their Snapchat posts before they disappeared and share to Twitter.

IG stories could be about disappearing voices of LGBTQI+ people, last messages of people needing to go in hiding or leave the country, etc.

For accounts over 10.000 fans, IG stories allow to insert “swipe up” GIFs that lead users to other content. So your stories can be an effective way to publish your call for action and generate engagement on your other channels.

Stories allow you to share other people’s content and therefore potentially engage their audience, generate alliances, engage the reciprocity effect, etc., all without having to create content yourself.

IG stickers are popular. Most are pretty much just gimmicks but they make content look more personal and can therefore favor engagement. Some stickers are directly MADE for engagement:

The Question or Quizzes Stickers features in IG Stories are a very convenient way to kick start this form of engagement, which can help people engage over topics that they are curious about (or that you make them curious about).

This works especially well for a Q&A type of interaction (or living library).

Question stickers can also be used to host your very own Instagram Stories contest that could look something like this :

If you want to take it one step further, you can add in another qualifier by requiring participants to tag a friend on your post before the contest goes live. This will get more eyes on your stories, and may even get you some more followers!

The poll or vote stickers are obviously interesting for quick engagement

For calls to action that require simultaneous collective action (remember the “thunderclap” site?), the Countdown sticker is useful. Once you put a Countdown Sticker on your Story, viewers can add the event to their calendar and turn on reminder, notifications so this will allow you to engage them at a specific moment. You can also use this tonotify viewers when you’ll be going Live (see below).

Music stickers are a good way to create the right mood for your message (pairing, again…). But they can also lead people to a specially recorded audio that could be part of your campaign, but it should of course not overwhelm your story’s main message.

Live videos (which work a lot like the Facebook’s live video feature. A Live tag will pop up on your Instagram Stories bubble to alert your followers that you’re live) help create a sense of community. It can also be a good way to create « happy few » feelings for audiences which you want to engage more into taking action, all the more as users can join in the live video and they then appear on the screen (much like a video conference).

For more ideas, this is an interesting article on fostering engagement with IG stories.

And HERE is a free online course to develop an IG stories strategy

Is information what people need?

June 20, 2019

This article first appeared on Freakonomics radio

The interesting take-aways for LGBTI campaigners:

Information is used by people depending on their existing views: The same piece of information, or explainer video, or real-life story, etc. will be used to REINFORCE attitudes, including negative ones, rather than challenge them. It was pretty clear so far that information alone doesn’t change people. This article suggests it might even be counter-productive!
People live in closed social circles with people who are like them, so influencing others is increasingly difficult. OK, we all know this. But while it will be near impossible to get homo/transphobic people into an LGBTI-supportive group, it is much easier to get them into an unrelated group (say on fashion or make up or cooking or traditional handicraft) that will be LGBTI supportive when the time comes. It’s much more beneficial to invest into finding these groups than trying to get your target group to come to your “obvious” platform.
“The equivalent of 10-year-old lab rats hate broccoli as much as 10-year-old humans do. In late adolescence, early adulthood, there’s this sudden craving for novelty … And then by the time you’re a middle-aged adult rat, you’re never going to try anything new for the rest of your life.” Don’t waste your time. Concentrate on the period in life when we’re genetically engineered to explore new territories (physical or mental).
One of the key barriers to change is overconfidence in their own opinions. Rather than avoid the conversation or “bust the myths” by providing the “correct information” yourself, ask people to explain their own attitude and they will start loosing confidence because chances are that they won’t be able to come up with something totally convincing. And when they are off-balance, change can happen.

Full article:

Here’s an interesting fact: legislators in several Republican-controlled states are pushing to eliminate the death penalty. Why is that interesting? Because most Republicans have typically been in favor of the death penalty. They’ve said it’s a deterrent against the most horrific crimes and a fitting penalty when such crimes do occur.

But a lot of Republicans have come to believe the death penalty does not deter crime — which happens to be an argument we offered evidence for in Freakonomics. They also say the lengthy legal appeals on death-penalty cases are too costly for taxpayers. Some Republicans also cite moral concerns with the death penalty. So, a lot of them have changed their minds.

We’ve all changed our minds at some point, about something. Maybe you were a cat person and became a dog person. Maybe you decided the place you lived, or the person you loved, or the religion you followed just wasn’t working for you anymore. But changing your mind is rarely easy. Although if you’re like most people, you would very much like other people to change their minds, to think more like you. Because, as you see it, it’s impossible for the world to progress, to improve unless some people are willing to change their minds.

On this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio: how to change minds, or at least try to.

Robert Sapolsky is a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University. He describes himself as half-neurobiologist and half-primatologist; he studies both neurons in petri dishes and wild baboons in East Africa. Sapolsky has a lot of experience with changing his mind. He was raised as an Orthodox Jew before he decided, at age 14, that “[t]here’s no God, there’s no free will, there is no purpose.” He used to be a classical music snob; then he married a musical-theater fanatic and director. Today, he often serves as rehearsal pianist for his wife’s productions.

Sapolsky has noticed something about mind-changing: it’s easier to do when you’re younger. In a survey he put together to look at people’s preferences in food, music, and so on, Sapolsky found that people do indeed become less open to novelty as they get older. Someone who hasn’t eaten sushi by age 35, for example, likely never will. He also found that humans are not the only animals that exhibit this behavioral pattern.

“[Y]ou take a lab rat and you look at when in its life it’s willing to try a novel type of food — and it’s the exact same curve!” Sapolsky says. “The equivalent of 10-year-old lab rats hate broccoli as much as 10-year-old humans do. In late adolescence, early adulthood, there’s this sudden craving for novelty … And then by the time you’re a middle-aged adult rat, you’re never going to try anything new for the rest of your life.”

There are a lot of reasons why it may be easier to change your mind when you’re younger. It could be the fact that your brain is simply more plastic then — something scientists assumed for a long time but now are starting to question. Or it could be that your positions are less entrenched, so it’s less costly to change them.

Or it could be that the stakes are lower: the fate of the world doesn’t hinge on whether you are pro-broccoli or anti-broccoli. But as life goes on, as the stakes rise, changing your mind can get more costly.

Several years before the United States invaded Iraq, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, signed onto a letter in support of such a move. At the time, Fukuyama was well-established as a prominent political thinker. In addition to writing a landmark book, he’s done two stints in the State Department. So his views on the Iraq War were taken seriously.

But as the invasion drew near, Fukuyama started to have second thoughts.

“My main concern was whether the United States was ready to actually stay in Iraq and convert it into a kind of stable, decent country,” Fukuyama says. “But even I was astonished at how bad the planning had been, and how faulty the assumptions were, that we were going to be greeted as liberators and that there would be a rapid transition just like in Eastern Europe to something that looked like democracy.”

In February of 2004, Fukuyama attended a dinner at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. The featured speaker was Dick Cheney. The crowd greeted the then-vice president with a big round of applause.

“And I just looked around at the people at my table and I said, ‘Why are these people clapping?’” Fukuyama says. “Because clearly this thing is turning into a huge fiasco. And that’s the moment that I decided, you know, these people are really nuts. I mean, they’re so invested in seeing this as a success that they can’t see this reality that’s just growing right in front of their eyes.”

Fukuyama paid a heavy price for his change of heart on the Iraq War. He was seen as having abandoned the neoconservative movement and lost close friends in the process. But to this day, he is surprised that so few of the supporters of the war remain unwilling to admit it was a mistake.

There’s another factor that may contribute to our reluctance to change our minds: overconfidence — our own belief that we are right, even in the absence of evidence. Just how much unearned confidence is floating around out there?

Consider a recent study by Julia Shvets, an economist at Christ’s College, Cambridge who studies decision-making. She and some colleagues surveyed over 200 managers at a British restaurant chain. The managers averaged more than two years on the job and their compensation was strongly tied to a quarterly performance bonus. The managers were asked to recall their past performance and to predict their future performance.

Shvets found that only about 35% of the managers were able to correctly say whether they fell in the top 20% of all managers, or the bottom 20%, or another 20%block somewhere in the middle. Forty-seven percent of managers were overconfident about their standing.

And these were people who had detailed feedback about their performance every quarter, which is a lot more than most employees get. How could this be? This is where memory comes into play, or maybe you’d call it optimism — or delusion.

“People who did worse in the previous competition tended to remember slightly better outcomes. People seem to be exaggerating their own past performance in their head when this performance is bad,” Shvets explains. “So what we conclude from this is that people, when given information about their past performance, use memory selectively. They remember good outcomes and they tend to forget bad ones.”

So maybe it’s not so much that people refuse to change their minds — or refuse to “update their priors,” as economists like to say. Maybe they just have self-enhancing selective memories.

Sothere are a lot of reasons why a given person might be reluctant to change their mind about a given thing. Selective memory, overconfidence, or the cost of losing family or friends. But let’s say you remain committed to changing minds — your own or someone else’s. How do you get that done? The secret may lie not in a grand theoretical framework, but in small, mundane objects like toilets, zippers, and ballpoint pens.

Steven Sloman, a psychology professor at Brown, conducted an experiment asking people to explain — not reason, but to actually explain, at the nuts-and-bolts level — how something works.

Chances are, you probably can’t explain very well how a toilet or a zipper or a ballpoint pen work. But, before you were asked the question, you would have thought you could. This gap between what you know and what you think you know is called the “illusion of explanatory depth.” It was first demonstrated by psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil.

“[P]eople fail to distinguish what they know from what others know,” Sloman says. “We’re constantly depending on other people, and the actual processing that goes on is distributed among people in our community.”

In other words, someone knows how a toilet works: the plumber. And you know the plumber; or, even if you don’t know the plumber, you know how to find a plumber.

You can see how the illusion of explanatory depth could be helpful in some scenarios: you don’t need to know everything for yourself, as long as you know someone who knows someone who knows something. But you could also imagine scenarios in which the illusion could be problematic, such as in the political domain.

Sloman and his collaborator Philip Fernbach basically repeated the Rozenblit and Keil experiment, but instead of toilets and zippers, they asked people about climate change and gun control. Unsurprisingly, most people weren’t able to explain climate change policies in much detail. But here’s what’s interesting: people’s level of confidence in their understanding of issues — which participants were asked to report at the start of the experiment — was drastically reduced after they tried, and failed, to demonstrate their understanding.

“It reduced the extremity of their confidence that they were right,” Sloman says. “In other words, asking people to explain depolarized the group.”

Matthew Jackson, an economist at Stanford who studies social and economic networks, used to believe that different people, given the same kind of information, would make decisions the same way, regardless of past experiences and influences.

That, however, is not what Jackson’s research suggests. In one experiment, Jackson had a bunch of research subjects read the same batch of abstracts from scientific articles about climate change. He found that people reading the same articles could interpret the articles very differently, depending on their initial positions.

In fact, information, far from being a solution, can actually be weaponized.

“There was a group of about a quarter to a third of the subjects who actually became more polarized, who interpreted the information heavily in the direction of their priors, and actually ended up with more extreme positions after the experiment than before,” Jackson says.

In other words, a person’s priors — which are shaped by previous experiences, influences, and social networks — play a big role in shaping current beliefs and decision-making processes. Steven Sloman, the Brown professor, thinks that the third factor is particularly important.

“[W]e believe what we do because the people around us believe what they do,” Sloman says. “This is the way humanity evolved. We depend on other people.”

So if our beliefs are shaped by the people around us, one antidote to inflexible thinking is simply, balance. Unfortunately, a great many of us are quite bad at creating diverse, well-balanced networks. People are prone to surrounding themselves with people just like them.

“We end up talking to people most of the time who have very similar past experiences and similar views of the world, and we tend to underestimate that,” Matthew Jackson says. “People don’t realize how isolated their world is. You know, people wake up after an election and are quite surprised that anybody could have elected a candidate that has a different view than them.”

You can find the full Freakonomics Radio episode, “How to Change Your Mind” at Freakonomics.com. You can also listen on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform.

WRITTEN BY

Stephen J. Dubner/ Freakonomics Radio

Stephen J. Dubner is co-author of the Freakonomics books and host of Freakonomics Radio.

LGBTQI+ Campaigning in Asia: Case studies

June 17, 2019

Campaigning is both one of the most challenging and one of the most exhilarating tasks for a campaigner for sexual, gender and bodily diversities.

It takes us “out there” to face the public, on what often seems like an impossible task to change hearts and minds.

It takes us into the extremely counter-intuitive field of the human psychology, exploring what makes people tick, and what makes societies change. And more often than not we scrabble about with our inspiration and courage, not knowing exactly what works, how it works, and the ways in which we could make things better.

And yet campaigning is the moment when our imagination heightens, when we unite to make it real, when we find the right messages to “crack the code” of people’s hearts, when we come together as a movement, with our friends and allies. Campaigning is when our own hearts beat faster.

This publication aims to provide you with some examples of these moments. It is a tribute to the work and the creativity of activists campaigning for sexual, gender and bodily diversities in Asia. Hopefully it to inspire you to draw on your own creativity.

It also aims to share with you some of the insights and the lessons learnt through these campaigns. This is important because, in addition to inspiration, changing hearts and minds also requires some good knowledge of social psychology, campaigning methodologies and research.

All of the case studies summarized here are edited from in-depth interviews with campaigners who shared their learning with us. The contents of this regional campaigning report are first and foremost the result of the sharp thinking of the organisations involved, and the networks supporting them. This is a collaborative effort that has arisen from the inspiring stories shared by the campaigners themselves. We would like to express our gratitude for all the people involved who have taken precious time to share their thoughts and ideas with us. These stories and experiences are those that the organisations wished to share with us.

We wish you a happy reading!

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