Intersection of storytelling and psychology
Follow the Frog, Rainforest Alliance
This week, I had the pleasure of speaking to MSc students at University College London (UCL) on how I apply psychology to my work. I absolutely loved it and as I was preparing the talk and case studies, I was struck by just how many great campaigns happen at the intersection of storytelling and psychology.
As a sustainability communications consultancy, we work with businesses worldwide that are trying to engage their audiences (inside and outside their organisation) with complex social and environmental issues to inspire behaviour change. There are endless insights from the world of psychology and behavioural science that shape our approach and here are just a few of the ones we discussed with UCL this week:
Keep it positive.
While there may be research to suggest that fear is a powerful motivator for change, it also has the potential to overwhelm or produce what psychologists call “psychic numbing”. In fact, some go as far as to say that messages about the predicted catastrophic consequences of climate change can even increase anti-environmental behaviour because when we threaten people’s deeply held beliefs that the world is just and orderly, they can overcome this threat by denying the existence of climate change altogether.
We need to keep storytelling hopeful and optimistic to inspire change. People are attracted to what makes them feel good and they stay away from things that make them feel bad. Positive storytelling is crucial.
Keep it simple.
We’ve all read the big, scary numbers. 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted globally each year, 8 million tons of plastic end up in our oceans every year. All true and devastating but they are not sufficient in driving behaviour change. Big numbers can make things seem unsolvable and “too big for me to impact”. Instead, we need to keep language simple, jargon-free and above all, actionable. It’s essential to make things easy to follow, which campaigns like Plastic Free July do so brilliantly.
Make it personal.
In Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini discusses the idea of appealing to someone’s identity to influence behaviour. The idea being that if you can prime someone’s identity in a certain way, we feel a personal and interpersonal pressure to behave in a certain way. So, if you prime someone’s identity as a “citizen” or “community member” – you might get them to recycle more, for example. Ways we can address this through comms is to create opportunities for people to reflect on their own personal connection to the environment. Did they grow up with a strong appreciation for nature? Was giving back something that their parents taught them?
Make it engaging.
Storytelling above all needs to inspire, surprise, entertain – it needs to emotionally engage with audiences. Awe is a particularly powerful “trigger of prosocial behaviour” and can increase our openness to learning and willingness to volunteer.
We love the Rainforest Alliance campaign, Follow the Frog (search ‘follow the frog’ on YouTube). It’s a quirky satire and uses humour to spread a serious message.
What lessons would you add to this?