Information is not enough
I’m an information junkie and I firmly believe that there’s no such thing as too much information. I love facts, figures and sites like Information is Beautiful, call me a geek but they really get me excited and spur me into action. However, for most people out there information is not enough.
I’ve just got back from a meeting in Prague with the British Council Challenge Europe project and Global Action Plan, where we met to discuss behaviour change in relation to climate change. Over the 4 days we talked the overarching theme was that “information is necessary but not sufficient to create behaviour change” and that we need knowledge in conjunction with behavioural motivators that tap into emotions, symbolic consumption, self efficacy, habits and social norms.
It was the latter that really interested me though, the fact that we tend to do what other people do, as this video so clearly illustrates. No matter how independent we think we all are, we are all guilty of it at some point. But this is changing and there is an undercurrent of people now, more so than ever before, who stay facing towards the door while everyone else continues to stare at a wall – the way society, companies, banks and governments have done for years. But to get to that critical mass, the tipping point where more people are facing forward than facing back, we need to keep our hats on and “use group pressure for some good” as this clip suggests.
