TCC is a social research and behaviour change specialists. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading.
Good morning and welcome to the TCC Weekly – your guide to the worlds of nudge, tug and prod.
This week there’s a bit of an ageing theme, as we look at the Peter Pan generation of adults buying colouring books, the impact of the budget on the young, and the new research explaining why you’re only as old as you…well, look. Plus, to show we really are down with the kids, we don our 'doo rag' and learn why progressives need to make like 50 Cent and Get Rich or Die Tryin’.
David Evans
Director
Behaviour Change ~ The "Peter Pan complex" and bias in business
Polls, Policies and Politics ~ Young people and the budget plus the secret Tony Blair speech which won the unions over
Health Hub ~ Why you're as old as you look...
Values Lab ~ Is it the government's responsibility to defend morality
Charlie’s Attic ~ Why The Left need to understand the desire to Get Rich or Die Tryin', plus the new Night Tube map
Also, from now on, we’d like to invite our readers to contribute content. Email us a link you think worthy of the hallowed Weekly and if we haven’t seen it we’ll accredit you for the good spot.
Meanwhile, on the topic of growing up, City AM break down the three ways you can learn from failure in business. Elsewhere in the world of business, a study has shown the role that biases play in holding back business, and the ways of identifying commercial groupthink.
Also this week, with new Tory rules to tackle chuggers aimed at "restoring faith in charities", what do you make of the new sculpture aimed at re-framing the third sector.
With the Stanford Prisoner Experiment shortly to be released as a film, psychologists look back on what one describes as a "sham".
Finally, a new study also shows that when it comes to getting on in the boardroom men are more goal orientated. And with the gender pay gap at the top of the news at the moment, Graeme Leach says we shouldn't equate inequality with discrimination.
With Corbyn, incredibly, in the lead (so deduce the Telegraph), Labour is in the grips of Corbyn-mania/-phobia (delete as appropriate, depending on where you stand on CND). The Telegraph caused a storm by explaining for Tories how to vote for Corbyn, and Labour centrists have written to CLPs encouraging them not to vote for him.
An international research team this week put conclusively paid to the Dorian Gray belief that you can disguise internal ageing - by showing that the age you look is a product of how much life you have lived.
Meanwhile, with new findings showing the preventative health benefits of friendship, Jeremy Hunt has argued that people need to do a better job of reaching out to older neighbours. And while a cuppa with a neighbour can cure the elderly then a selfie can save the young, according to a report not so long ago claiming youngsters have stopped drinking because they don't want to look bad on social media. Although other scientists have taken a different approach to alcoholism, by discovering a boozer gene.
Meanwhile, teen pregnancies are down too, now at their lowest level since the 1940s, thanks to a range of 'developed world' factors.
And finally it's been shown that smoking is linked to deprivation, with poorer people less likely to be able to quit thanks to other life pressures. And the furore about whether e-cigarettes are the answer goes on, with warnings this week that they're a fire hazard.
The Values Lab is based on the Values Modes segmentation tool – created by Cultural Dynamics and used by TCC. In order to understand the things that motivate people, the model divides the population into Pioneers (inner-directed, liberal, ethics driven), Prospectors (esteem-driven, individualistic, aspirational) and Settlers (resource-driven, socially conservative, pessimistic).
With George Osborne's budget being portrayed as a shift to woo working-class voters, Jonathan Freedland suggests an alternative way of reading it; he suggests the budget was cleverly framed, not to appeal to deprived Settler-type voters, but to appeal to morally concerned middle-class Pioneers. A ConservativeHome blog puts this more explicitly.
We look at the latest values data to try and decipher the role the different values groups believe the Government should take in morality.
Pioneer
Prospector
Settler
Agree or strongly agree that the government should do more to protect morality in society
18%
28%
27%
The findings show that in fact Pioneers are the least likely group to believe the government should play a role in morality - although this is perhaps to do with the way the question is framed. It would be interesting to see whether the data would vary if the statement was "The government should behave morally".
Also this week, with the hard left turning against the Eurozone (as well as the hard right), anti-EU sentiment is at an all time high. Revolt on the Right author Matthew Goodwin argues that identity - not economics - needs to be at the heart of the referendum debate.
Finally this week, clamber up to the cloistered confines of Charlie's Attic, where sages and geriatrics vie for your attention:
Coo over the gorgeous little fox cubs the League Against Cruel Sports are using to attack the callousness of the hunting lobby. (Yes, even we're susceptible to propaganda when it's that cute).
