If you want to promote a behavior like recycling, appeal to your audience’s aspirations and call those who do the right thing “heroes.” Makes sense, right? We actually don’t think so. After some strategic musings, based on findings from a range of behavior experts, here’s why we think this common approach won’t work.

1. According to the dictionary, a hero is “a person of superhuman qualities and often semi-divine origin …” In other words, a hero is someone who is special—by nature, outside the norm.
2. Norming has been proven time and time again to be the most powerful strategy in changing behaviors. To norm a behavior, you want to give the impression that it is literally the normal thing to do. As sophisticated and independent as we like to think we are, the “everyone’s doing it” argument works best with us humans.
3. So if heroes aren’t normal, and we all want to be normal, it follows that we don’t want to be heroes. Another way to put it is that heroes are anti-norming. (They wear tights in public, after all. Ack!)

But whom to put forth as a model of your target behavior, if not a hero? Why, Clark Kent, of course! Or, if you prefer, Joe Blow, the girl next door, Everyman. Clark will be your best influencer precisely because he is not special.

We recommend featuring a person who appears to be just like the average member of your priority group—in every way but one: the desired behavior. Clark lives in your neighborhood, dresses like you, has the same level of education and makes about the same amount of money as you do. The only difference is he recycles his food scraps, and you don’t. Better yet: Clark and all the rest of your neighbors recycle their food scraps. Sadly, you’re the last one on your block who doesn’t.

The message is two-fold: one, if you aren’t currently practicing a certain behavior (recycling food scraps, for example), you’re standing conspicuously outside your peer group; and two, if you do begin practicing the behavior, we promise you won’t stand out.

Contests are everywhere—particularly in our field of behavior change—so we know the argument we’re about to make will be unpopular with a lot of people. Here it is: while competition is exciting in Olympic events, we believe contests are not the hands-down outreach winner so many assume them to be.

The “spirit of competition” is often touted as an effective motivator, with vast resources being poured into contests that pit neighbor against neighbor, for example. We believe there are two problems with contests like these:

1. The pleasure of winning is not a universal emotion, and
2. Prizes place the motivation outside the individual and so only create temporary behavior change, at best.

Questionable Assumptions and Labeling Losers

It’s often assumed that winning a competition evokes happiness, pride in achievement and satisfaction in everyone. These are core human emotions identified by psychologists as being universal. However, we know from copious cross-cultural research that winning does not always bring happiness, pride and satisfaction. In many cultures, collaboration is valued more highly than competition. While winning a game might make one person feel proud, another might feel ashamed because of his/her particular background and values. So it is vitally important to put on cross-cultural “goggles” when we design outreach campaigns.

Another consequence of contests is all of the “losers,” who don’t win a prize and are therefore disappointed. This is typically the majority of participants, so why alienate most of your audience by dooming them to the label of loser?

Is Competition Now a Religion?

It is incorrect to assume that the desire to win will always motivate and change behavior. According to Alfie Kohn, author of No Contest: The Case Against Competition, “The race to be Number One has been described as America’s state religion. We have been trained … to believe in the value of beating people … Research and experience, however, demonstrate that competition is actually destructive … and counterproductive …” In another Kohn book entitled Punished by Rewards, he argues persuasively that holding out a potential reward (extrinsic motivation) is highly ineffective at changing behavior long-term.

A carefully designed contest can be an effective tactic for a target group that is more competitively oriented, if it is part of a larger, integrated campaign. In general we suggest using more constructive tactics that are more likely to result in long-term behavior change. We think that’s a winning idea.

 

Image by skynesher via iStockphoto