The Subtle Science of Persuasion
I like to dream up new visual tools for displaying eco-data, with the goal of informing an audience and encouraging them to make some type of change. Traditionally, I’ve focused on the information, hoping that the numbers and trends themselves would elicit a response, but it’s clear I need to work on my persuasion.
Today, I spotted this list of “Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive.” I clicked out of interest, and then realized that many of their examples are of ad campaigns directed toward energy or material efficiency. Take item 2 for example:
“Introduce herd effect in highly personalized form. The hotel sign in the bathroom informed the guests that many prior guests chose to be environmentally friendly by recycling their towels. However, when the message mentioned that majority of the guests who stayed in this specific room chose to be more environmentally conscious and reused their towels, towel recycling jumped 33%, even though the message was largely the same.”
Interesting, eh? And though it doesn’t have an environmental example, number 8 got me thinking:
“If a call to action is motivated by fear, people will block it, unless call to action has specific steps. A group of people received a pamphlet describing the dangers of tetanus infection. It didn’t describe much else. The second group of people got a description of tetanus infection, plus a set of instructions on how to get vaccinated. The second group exhibited much higher sign-up rate for tetanus vaccination than the first one, where many participants tried to block out the high-fear message urging that something as rare as tetanus would never happen to them.“
I have long been critical of the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” for this very reason. I left the theater feeling utterly devoid of hope – moving past the “concerned” or “motivated” stage, directly to the “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” stage. Probably not the intended outcome, but I think the movie-makers aimed for a deeply emotional fear response, and didn’t leave the audience with a sense of action or empowerment.
What was your impression? And can you see other applications of these very persuasive ideas?
Can't get enough? Try these related posts:
